Houston ? In what could be one of the most significant debris discoveries yet from the shattered Columbia, searchers found a data recorder that may hold valuable clues as to what destroyed the space shuttle, the accident investigation board said Wednesday night.

A spokeswoman for the board, Laura Brown, said the ship’s recorder was intact but sustained some heat damage. Officials are hoping that temperature and aerodynamic pressure data can be retrieved from its magnetic tape, she said.

Brown compared the recorder to an airplane’s black box.

“We have no way of knowing whether the data can be recovered,” she said. But she added that if it can, “it will give us, hopefully, a lot of information about what was going on with the orbiter.”

The recorder was discovered near Hemphill, Texas, and was being sent to Johnson Space Center for analysis. Officials said they believe it was found Wednesday.

Brown said these recorders — called the orbiter experiment support systems — normally are turned on right before a space shuttle begins its descent through the atmosphere and run for one or two hours.

Columbia disintegrated on Feb. 1 over Texas during its atmospheric re-entry, just 16 minutes short of a planned Florida touchdown.

The investigation board suspects the left wing of Columbia was breached, possibly by launch debris 16 days earlier, and that the searing atmospheric gases penetrated the hole and carved a deadly path through the wing and into the left landing gear compartment. All seven astronauts were killed.

About 30,000 pieces of Columbia have been found, representing nearly 20 percent of the descending shuttle.

Shuttles have a variety of computers and data recorders, but nothing directly comparable to the black boxes on airplanes that give crash investigators detailed flight information.

In New Orleans, meanwhile, NASA’s deputy associate administrator for spaceflight, Michael Kostelnik, led a meeting to discuss how to keep the shuttle program active through 2015.