Shuttle debris and data under scrutiny

CREWS combed suburban gardens and remote Texas woodlands for the remains of space shuttle Columbia yesterday as experts focused on a heat surge on the left side of the doomed spacecraft in the early investigation of why it disintegrated.

For a third day, hundreds of police and soldiers fanned out across east Texas and Louisiana in a search for debris and the remains of the seven astronauts who perished on Saturday when NASA’s oldest shuttle broke apart high over Texas.

Body parts, fragments and pieces of the shuttle were strewn across an area more than 100 miles long and 10 miles wide, much of it in the thick Texas forests known as the Piney Woods.