When the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated during its return to Earth on Feb. 1, 2003, debris was scattered over hundreds of miles in Texas and Louisiana. The seven crew members were lost. Most of the data compiled during the mission was presumed gone.

Incredibly, a 400MB Seagate hard drive (at right) from the shuttle, containing 2.5-inch platters, was found in a dried-up lake bed a few months after the tragedy. And now comes news that a data recovery team at Eden Prairie, Minn.-based Kroll Ontrack Inc. has retrieved 99 percent of the information from the hard drive, a task that's taken four-and-a-half years.

What's on the drive? Information about several atmospheric scientific experiments conducted during the 16-day mission. Jon Edwards, a senior clean room engineer at Kroll, reported that among the tests was to find out how xenon gas flows in zero gravity, an experiment conducted for the National Institute of Standards and Technology.