Hunt for Shuttle Wreckage Turns Up Junk

Burnt toast, a truck mud flap, a Chevrolet alternator -- authorities collecting Columbia wreckage across what may be the world’s largest accident scene are getting lots of calls about ordinary junk.

“It’s easy to speculate. It’s easy to be confused,” NASA spaceflight office deputy Michael Kostelnik said.

Since Saturday’s tragedy, NASA has collected thousands of pieces of space shuttle wreckage. But plenty of items not from the shuttle are being turned in by the public, examined by law enforcement officers and then thrown away.

These include a slice of burnt toast in Yuma, Ariz., and a chunk of orange foam that was once a piece of a boat on a central Florida beach. Both were called in to authorities as possible shuttle pieces.

In California, local authorities were told to call the Highway Patrol if they found something. But CHP spokesman Tom Marshall said there is not much the agency can do.

“We at the California Highway Patrol are not rocket scientists,” he said.

Marshall said law enforcement agents are taking a look at each item, and unless they can definitely identify it as something other than from Columbia, they are passing it on to NASA.

In Arizona, where the FBI responded to reports of charred items that were not wreckage, Gov. Janet Napolitano pleaded for common sense. “Let’s not overestimate this,” she said. “Every piece of burned metal or ash that is found in Arizona over the next two weeks is not necessarily from the shuttle.”

At Johnson Space Center, NASA spokesman Mike Curie asked the public to err on the side of caution.

“We’d rather go through 1,000 pieces of stuff that are not part of the shuttle to find one that is,” he said.