Physical Society Colloquium

Understanding the Columbia Accident

Doug Osheroff
Nobel Laureate

Stanford University

Douglas Osheroff, along with Robert Richardson and his Ph.D supervisor Dave Lee, received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1996 “for their discovery of superfluidity in helium-3”, work which he began as a graduate student at Cornell. In 2003, Osheroff was selected to serve as a panel member on the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) that was set up following the loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia and her crew of 7 during re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere. He served in a similar vein as Richard Feynman, who helped investigate the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion in 1986 as a member of the Rogers Commission.