CREW'S RESEARCH ADMIRED DATA FROM FIRE STUDIES COULD BE USED FOR CLEANER-BURNING ENGINES.

Byline: Dan Anderson Staff Writer

Mohamed Abid and Paul Ronney, research scientists at the University of Southern California, hadn't slept much since mission STS-107 began Jan. 16.

As the lead scientist and principal investigator, respectively, of the SOFBALL project, they were monitoring two teams of Columbia astronauts studying fire - research that could someday lead to cleaner-burning engines in automobiles and aircraft.

``My brother lives in New York and he called me in the morning and told me, `There is something going on with the shuttle. It sounds like they lost contact.' I turned on the TV and I was glued,'' Abid said Saturday.

``These are people I worked with, we heard them a lot during the mission, and their comments - a lot of back and forth between the air and ground. They did a really great job and I wanted to see them personally to congratulate them.

``Now I won't get that chance. It's sad.''

Abid broke the news to Ronney in a phone call, barely a half-hour after Columbia broke apart over Texas. The news was especially haunting for Ronney, who was a back-up astronaut on a 1997 Columbia mission.

He knew the 18 months of training that prepared the crew, and knew instantly that they could not survive a disaster 40 miles above the Earth.

Both men had worked with astronauts Michael Anderson, David Brown, Kalpana Chawla and Ilan Ramon off and on for the past two years on the research project known as SOFBALL, short for Structure of Flame Balls at Low Lewis numbers - a series of experiments studying how tiny balls of flame react in zero gravity.

``I don't know how you describe them: very talented people, very genuine. The list is too long,'' Abid said.

Researchers hope to replicate the clean-burning flames back on Earth, which would allow for lower engine emissions.

``We will not drive cars with these flame balls, but it will give us ... ideas to increase the efficiency of any combustible engine,'' Abid said. ``We saw phenomena we weren't expecting at all.''

Ronney said some of the astronauts were so taken with the unique nature of the flame balls they started naming them. ``They had a gift to make you feel like your experiment - and there were several on board - was really special.''

Ronney first proposed the SOFBALL study to NASA in 1989; a shuttle mission in 1997 - the one for which he was on the stand-by crew - returned some preliminary data, but he and other researchers expected to get the bulk of their data on this, the last of their project's missions.

Some of the data collected during orbit was sent directly back to Earth, but Ronney estimated about half their research wasn't going to be reviewed until after Columbia returned, and is now lost.

Abid said he hopes to see a quick return to space research.

``If (the astronauts) are watching down and see us stop, I think they'd be disappointed. If we end it here, their effort was worth nothing.''