- Person
- Douglas Osheroff
- Lived
- b. 1945
- Field
- Low-temperature physics
- From
- American
The story
Douglas Osheroff was born in 1945 in Aberdeen, Washington. His father was the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia and his mother the daughter of a Lutheran minister. As a graduate student at Cornell he noticed the small anomalies that revealed superfluid helium-3, a discovery that brought him a share of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics. He later moved from Bell Laboratories to Stanford University.
On February 1, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia broke apart as it returned to Earth, killing all seven astronauts aboard. Osheroff was appointed to the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, serving much as the physicist Richard Feynman had on the commission that investigated the Challenger disaster in 1986. He took charge of a central question: why pieces of the insulating foam on the shuttle’s external fuel tank broke away during launch. At a public hearing he introduced himself as the board’s foamologist.
In work done at Stanford, including tests on foam in a kitchen sink using red ink, he examined the theory that liquid nitrogen trapped in the foam and heated during flight, a process called cryopumping, made pieces break off. His tests showed that cryopumping produced flat cracks in the foam but was not enough on its own to make it shed, contrary to earlier claims by NASA, and he suggested it might act together with other causes. He also presented results of NASA arc-jet tests on how superheated gas damages aluminium structures like those inside the shuttle’s wing.
The board’s final report, released on August 26, 2003, concluded that a piece of foam had struck Columbia’s left wing during launch and that foam shedding had long been known but wrongly treated as acceptable. It made 29 recommendations to improve safety. NASA adopted them before the shuttle flew again in 2005, adding, among other measures, an inspection boom used to check each orbiter for damage after launch.
Why it matters
The investigation Osheroff served on identified the cause of the Columbia disaster and led to safety changes that protected the astronauts on every later shuttle flight.
About Douglas Osheroff
Physicist who, as a Cornell graduate student, spotted the clue that helium-3 becomes a superfluid, and later helped investigate the Columbia space shuttle disaster. Nobel Prize 1996.
Sources
- Watching the CAIB at work The Space Review
- CAIB public hearing transcript, June 12, 2003 Columbia Accident Investigation Board (UNT Digital Library archive)
- Columbia Accident Investigation Board Wikipedia
- Douglas D. Osheroff, Biographical NobelPrize.org
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.