Space Center, Houston ? NASA recovered a section of Columbia’s wing and inspected a photo shot by a military telescope that shows a gray streak behind the shuttle, moments before it broke apart. Officials hoped the wing piece — the most significant find yet — could hold clues to the breakup but said Friday the photo revealed little.

The space agency did not yet know if the 2-foot piece of wing found near Fort Worth came from Columbia’s left side, where sensors registered surges in temperatures just before the shuttle came apart during its descent last Saturday.

The photo, shot by a powerful Air Force telescope camera in New Mexico, shows a fuzzy, batwing-shaped silhouette of the shuttle with a dark gray streak behind the left wing.

Shuttle program manager Ron Dittemore said it would take more study to determine whether the image shows a problem with the shuttle, and if the gray streak is from Columbia or only a technical aberration in the photo.

Some people have said they saw damage on the left wing, thought to be the heart of Columbia’s problems, Dittemore noted.

“It does look like there’s something a little different about the left-hand side behind the wing than the right-hand side,” he said.

Dittemore said the photo did not resolve the question of whether Columbia may have been seriously damaged by a chunk of foam debris that struck the shuttle’s left wing shortly after liftoff Jan. 16.

“I’d be cautious about what all this information means,” he said. “We’ve got a long way to go.”

As for the recovered wing section, Dittemore said it had 26 to 27 inches of carbon-composite panel, which reinforces the leading edges of space shuttle wings for thermal protection during the searing heat of atmospheric re-entry, reaching as high as 3,000 degrees. The piece also has 18 inches of actual wing structure.

Shuttle program manager Ron Dittemore talks about a photo of the space shuttle Columbia, shot by a U.S. Air Force camera as it flew over New Mexico in the final moments before it broke apart. Dittemore, speaking Friday at a news briefing at Johnson Space Center in Houston, said it would take further study to determine whether the image shows a problem with the shuttle and whether the gray streak behind the left wing is from Columbia, or only a technical aberration in the photo.

During his briefing with reporters, Dittemore went through diagrams showing the gradual heating change in the sensors on Columbia’s left wing and adjoining area of the fuselage, where some sensors registered a temperature increase while others stopped working.

Hopes have faded that NASA might get more information from data from the final 32 seconds recorded between the time Mission Control’s computers stopped reading the data to the point all sensors went dead. The data were too garbled to be interpreted and largely useless, said James Gavura, director of NASA’s Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System.

“There was 31 seconds (of silence) and then one more second of data,” he said.

That second could contain information on the position of the orbiter just before it began to tumble and break up, Gavura said.

Although that second has not been verified as shuttle data, Gavura said it appeared to have the proper signature.