Future spacecraft to carry 'black boxes', says report

Small, heat-resistant "black boxes" will transmit data back to Earth when future space probes break up during re-entry to the Earth's atmosphere, the magazine New Scientist is reporting, quoting a development plan signed recently by NASA. The boxes will be used to improve spacecraft design for both human and robotic missions.

The magazine explains how aeroplane speed and altitude data, as well as pilot conversations, are recorded in briefcase-sized black boxes that can be retrieved and studied in the wake of a crash. "But such technologies are not usually used on spacecraft such as the shuttle, which experiences extreme heating when roaring back into Earth's atmosphere", the report says.

"People had not figured how to put black boxes on spacecraft before because the boxes would tend to burn up during re-entry," Dan Rasky, a materials scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, US, is quoted as saying.

Instead, flight data is continuously beamed to Earth using satellites - a stream that stops abruptly during a catastrophe like the break-up of the shuttle Columbia in February 2003. But that shuttle happened to contain an experimental data recorder that stored information about the temperature, pressure, and vibrations felt by 721 different onboard sensors.

"It wasn't really designed to survive [a disaster upon] re-entry, but it did, and it was very helpful in reconstructing what happened to the orbiter," says William Ailor, director of the Center for Orbital and Re-entry Debris Studies at the Aerospace Corporation, a non-profit analytical company in El Segundo, California, US.

Now, reports the New Scientist, the Aerospace Corporation and NASA are working together to develop black boxes called Reentry Breakup Recorders (REBRs). These could be used in the space shuttle's successor, called the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV), planned for launch in 2014, and in any other object that re-enters Earth's atmosphere from space.

"They'd be like little parasites," says James Arnold, a researcher at NASA's Ames Center for Nanotechnology. A number of small, dome-shaped black boxes - weighing just 1 kilogram and spanning less than 30 centimetres - would stick to surfaces inside the CEV's crew cabin and wings.

They would quietly take data during the flight, but would only "activate" in the event of a major disaster. The heat from the craft's explosion would trigger the boxes to detach - perhaps by melting the adhesive that fixes them to the CEV. Then, as they fall to Earth, the boxes would transmit their data, obviating any need to retrieve them later.

"If you understand how it breaks apart, you can then design a spacecraft that breaks apart the way you want it to," Ailor told New Scientist.