Here is what I just sent off to NASA.

I observed Columbia's re-entry from a location southeast of St. George, UT. I have never observed a re-entry before. I observed the entire flight over us with 10 X 50 binoculars. As it flew over, I saw at least 3 occurances of what appeared to be objects coming off of the shuttle. The objects that came off looked like meteors going in the opposite direction as the shuttle. Two of the occurances we while the shuttle was to the west of our location. The last one was bigger than the first two. It also appeared to go farther away from the shuttle as if it had a little force behind it. The all appeared to come from the right side of the shuttle (left when coming towards us, right when going away). I thought that all of this was normal as I thought that the shuttle loses tile on every mission. The fire and trail around the shuttle were not constant. I didn't notice any brightening but I did notice that it occationally got bigger and smaller. The trail appeared orange. The area by the shuttle was a purple, maybe magenta color.

Our exact location, determined by a pilot friend of mine that was with us was.

N 37deg, 2 min. 21.00 sec. W 113 deg, 30 min. 34.84 sec.

He extracted this from a USGS 7.5 minute quadrangle of the area.

I hope this helps with your investigation.

Thanks. David Dunn 801-961-3253 - Work 801-544-7705 - Home