The crew of Columbia lived for at least one minute after their last communication with NASA ground controllers in Houston, a potentially important finding that could affect future efforts to improve the survivability of space shuttle accidents, investigators said Tuesday.

The details of the crew’s final moments in space have been among the most closely guarded aspects of the probe, but in recent days the Columbia Accident Investigation Board has received a briefing on new findings that suggest the crew survived past their final transmissions sent by the shuttle, the investigators said.

Ground controllers had known for several minutes that something was abnormal on the shuttle, seeing unusual spikes in some temperature sensors and other temperature sensors go dead. NASA lost communication with the shuttle only 16 minutes before it was to touch down at Cape Canaveral.

By then, the shuttle, flying at 12,500 mph, was raining tons of debris over East Texas. A great deal of information has since been reconstructed from an onboard data recorder that ground search teams recovered on March 19.

The data recorder continued to operate and store critical information after signals from the Columbia had either stopped or become garbled. An analysis of that data now suggests that the crew did not perish when communications went dead but perhaps lived for a minute or longer, according to investigators. That information was first reported in today’s editions of the New York Times.

If the crew could have survived longer than earlier believed, it could lend more credibility to the idea that an ejection system could provide some hope of surviving another accident.