It was one of the most iconic and heart-stopping movie images of 2003: the Columbia Space Shuttle ignited, burning and crashing to earth in fragments.

Now, amazingly, data from a hard drive recovered from the fragments has been used to complete a physics experiment - CXV-2 - that took place on the doomed Shuttle mission.

Columbia's fragments were painstakingly and exhaustively collected. Amongst them was a 400MB Seagate hard drive which was in the sort of shape you think it would be in after being in an explosive fire and then hurled to earth from several miles up with a ferocious impact.