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(Long) This is a digital microscope,
and I'm going to show you how we
use this instrument to investigate
the debris that was brought back
from the International Space Station.
The debris was collected on tapes
like these, and what the astronauts
did is they wrapped the tape around
their glove of their spacesuits,
and they collected the debris. When
they brought it back -- they have
to reuse everything on the space
station -- so they actually brought
it back in this bag that was originally
used to take up a sweater for Peggy
Whitson, who was a commander on the
space station. When they brought it
back, we used this instrument to take
a look at it, and as you can see on
this screen, there's a lot of
different sizes and shapes of
fragments. We can use this instrument
to go up to 200x magnification.
So we can zoom in on the fragment
and get evidence from them so that
we can figure out what happened. We
were able to determine that the
fragments came off of the joint that
rotates 360 degrees so that the solar
arrays are always facing the sun.
We were also able to determine, using
pictures like this � (This is from
a scanning electron microscope. And
like I was telling you before, it
uses electrons instead of light to
see things. And we can use
magnifications 100,000 times better
than the human eye.) We were able
to see the features on here and
determine why the debris was coming
off. And that's how we use pictures
like this in a failure investigation.