NACOGDOCHES, Texas – As pieces of Columbia rained down Saturday over eastern Texas, Tommy Abbate rushed to a park in search of the historic debris.
He soon staked his find, a small piece of bent titanium along the fifth hole of a Frisbee golf course in Pecan Park. Abbate called authorities and, while he waited, the 20-year-old college sophomore summoned his fraternity brothers.
"I called just about everybody I knew,” he said, including friends in Houston 140 miles south.
After checking out Abbate's discovery, about 10 of his frat brothers decided to search, but didn't find any debris from the space shuttle. More than 1,200 debris sites have since been marked in Nacogdoches County.
The debris is evidence to a host of national agencies trying to figure out what caused Columbia to disintegrate above Texas on its way toward a landing in Florida.
Residents still are finding shuttle debris, but with twisted metal, ceramic tiles, mission paperwork, computer pieces, test tubes and body parts found in 27 Texas counties and several states, federal officials need more than a network of frat boys with cell phones on a scavenger hunt to keep tabs on it all.
In stepped the fraternity brothers' school, Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, which established a sophisticated mapping center more than five years ago.
The Forest Resources Institute was established with a $5 million grant from a local foundation to map natural resources in eastern Texas, particularly for the lumber industry; but researchers realized several years ago the detailed data, including streets, weather and demographics, could be critical to emergency workers responding to disasters.
"We didn't plan on a shuttle crash, but a disaster is a disaster,” said James Kroll, the institute's director.
Using global positioning satellites — or GPS units — teams are attempting to record precisely where every piece of the shuttle, its contents and seven-member crew fell to Earth.
Teams of three trek to each piece of wreckage, whether alongside the highway, in a farmer's field, a schoolyard or deep in woods, and use the portable data-processing receivers to pull longitudes and latitudes from a series of satellites once every second. The average of that data identifies its exact location within a meter.
The operator puts in additional information, including a basic description of the piece. The devices are taken to the center's campus office where the information is downloaded and translated into locator maps.
Occasionally, they are called to look at debris that has nothing to do with the shuttle, but they check to be sure, Kroll said. “We've had a lot of chicken-bone calls and trailer hitches.”
Recovery teams go back later to tag and bag the items for transport to Barksdale Air Force Base near Shreveport, La.
So far, the university's crews have logged more than 1,000 pieces in Nacogdoches County — the only area it initially planned to do — but state and federal authorities want it all.
With more than 100,000 pieces of debris found so far in the 500-square-mile crash area, the job quickly spiraled out of control for the university's crew, which had 15 teams working Monday morning.
Instead of logging each tiny shard of metal or strip of insulation, the GPS teams began individually logging only those pieces deemed by federal authorities as especially important, such as microchips or circuit boards. The others were marked as groups of debris fields.
By late yesterday afternoon, GPS-maker Trimble and others donated enough GPS units and trained personnel that Kroll expects to have as many as 100 teams mapping the crash site today.
With the information gathered so far, authorities can see where to concentrate the search. The concentrated areas of the debris begin south of Dallas and Forth Worth and head southeast, becoming heavier near Douglass, about 12 miles west of Nacogdoches, Kroll said.
Those pieces are fairly small – roughly 90 percent are smaller than 12 inches – with the bigger chunks of debris falling along a swath 100 miles long and 10 miles wide in San Augustine County to the Toledo Bend Reservoir, which straddles the Texas-Louisiana state line.
It is in that general area, Kroll said, “where the command module and, unfortunately, where some of the astronauts probably will be found.”
But debris could be almost anywhere, he said. “That vehicle was 200,000 feet up. It depends on the size of the debris, (but) it could end up across the ocean.”
For several years, the university has been lobbying state and federal officials for funding to expand the center and use it as a model of geospatial information centers across the country, including at Penn State University.
"The thing that's just astounded us is how well this fits into the plan, the dream we've had for two years to establish these geospatial service centers….We didn't think a space shuttle ever would crash in our back yard,” said R. Scott Beasley, dean of the college of forestry. “This essentially fell right at a place where we were ready for it.”
Even with all the high-tech equipment, specially trained searchers and cell-phone-armed citizens, authorities acknowledge they won't find all the remnants of Columbia for a long time, if ever.
“In 10, 15 years from now, hunters are going to be wandering around the woods and find a piece,” Kroll said.
