COLUMBIA LOST
Maui photos unlikely to help NASA, official says

By Timothy Hurley
Advertiser Maui County Bureau

Images taken on Maui of the shuttle Columbia in orbit may not be helpful in offering evidence linking the disaster to damage that may have occurred at liftoff to the craft's protective tiles.

The Department of Defense and NASA yesterday asked the Air Force not to talk about the photos taken at its Maui Space Surveillance Complex at the 10,000-foot summit of Haleakala, declaring them part of the ongoing investigation.

But the Maui facility's commander told The New York Times Sunday that only images of the top of the shuttle were captured, and no anomalies were observed.

What's more, Lt. Col. Jeffrey McCann said, the facility's most powerful telescope was not used for the photographs, so the images are just routine.

McCann said NASA didn't ask for assistance, so technicians never took high-resolution pictures from its largest telescope, which has a lens 12 feet across.

The shots "just looked like the normal images we take," McCann said.

Rich Garcia, an Air Force spokesman, yesterday said the Maui facility routinely takes photos of objects in space to help calibrate its telescopes.

The facility twice took space-shuttle photos at NASA's request, he said — once during Columbia's third mission in 1982 and the other when John Glenn went into orbit in 1998. During that mission, NASA maneuvered the shuttle to give the Maui telescope a better view.

Some experts have questioned NASA's decision not to request high-resolution images of the tiles from powerful ground-based telescopes.