Description: When tragedy struck during the space shuttle era, mourners found a place to honor the fallen astronauts of the tragic Challenger and Columbia flights at Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.
Description: Here at the Smithsonian we love to observe. So of course on August 23, 2011, at 1:51 PM, when a 5.8 magnitude earthquake shook the Washington, DC region and many of us with it, we immediately started to observe what happened and how we could document it. As the Institution's historians, inevitably we needed to know, had this happened before and what were the effects? After