Now this is some data recovery.
Columbia’s fragments were painstakingly and exhaustively collected. Amongst them was a 400MB Seagate hard drive which was in the sort of shape you think it would be in after being in an explosive fire and then hurled to earth from several miles up with a ferocious impact.
The Johnson Space Centre workers analysing the shuttle crash sent it off the CVX-2 (Critical Viscosity of Xenon) experiment engineers, who sent it on to Kroll Ontrack in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to see if the data, any data, could be recovered. For researcher Robert Berg and his team it was the only hope, a terribly slim hope, of salvaging significant data from the experiment looking at Xenon gas flows in microgravity.
The Kroll people managed to recover 90 percent or so of the 400MB of data from the drive with its cracked and burned casing.
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