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Temperatures rose sharply on the left side of shuttle Columbia and it began rolling to the left in the final moments before it broke apart in the skies over Texas, killing the seven astronauts on board, NASA said.
Shuttle programme manager Ron Dittemore told a news conference the unusual events pointed toward a "thermal problem," or heat, as a possible cause of the disaster, but that it was too early to say why it happened.
As Americans mourned the lost astronauts, hundreds of police and soldiers fanned out across Texas and Louisiana in a grim and sometimes gory search for clues as to what caused the oldest shuttle in NASA's fleet to break up just 16 minutes from gliding into Florida.
Flight crew operations director Bob Cabana told reporters that remains of all seven astronauts had been recovered, but NASA later issued a statement saying he "misspoke."
"Cabana says NASA has not confirmed that remains from all seven crew members have been found. He was misinformed about that subject."
Before the clarification, Cabana said NASA was working with the Israeli government to make sure the body of Ilan Ramon, the first Israeli astronaut, was treated according to Jewish traditions.
Columbia disintegrated high above the Texas plains almost 17 years to the day of the explosion that destroyed the space shuttle Challenger on January 28, 1986, killing the six astronauts and one American school teacher on board.
With the United States jumpy about a countdown to possible war with Iraq and an Israeli astronaut part of the crew, US government officials were swift to rule out terrorism as behind the disaster.
Body parts, fragments and pieces of the shuttle were strewn across an area 160 kilometres long and 16km wide. In rugged rural areas, horses and four-wheel drive vehicles were used in the search and by midday more than 500 pieces of the shuttle had been recovered in Nacogdoches County, Texas.
F-16 warplanes retraced the path of Columbia, which dramatically flared and broke up leaving white trails, tinged with fire, cascading through clear blue skies. The flaming wreckage rained down over eastern Texas and Louisiana.
A grim President George W Bush, who led the nation in grief and vowed the space shuttle programme would continue, bowed his head in church on Sunday as a minister prayed for the spirit of the dead astronauts "to be kept alive in all of us."
World leaders sent their condolences to the United States.
On Fox News Sunday, Ambassador Mohammed Aldouri, Iraq's representative to the United Nations, said only, "This is an unfortunate accident ... In Iraq they view this accident from that point of view. Certainly this is unfortunate for the families ... and for all people here in the United States."
Dittemore said that sensors on Columbia's left side showed temperatures rising 60 degrees Fahrenheit in five minutes just before the break-up. The heat was most pronounced around the wheel well, he said. Data showed the spacecraft was rolling left, indicating drag on that side.
Dittemore said the shuttle's left wing was banged 80 seconds after launch by insulation that fell off the fuel tanks, but that engineers believed it caused no serious damage to Columbia's heatshield.
He said investigators would take a close look at the wheel well issue to see if the problem originated there. There were indications this was "a thermal problem rather than a structural problem, but it's too early for me to speculate on what all that means," Dittemore said.
A shuttle experiences 1650 degree C temperatures when it re-enters the earth's atmosphere, but is protected by tiles that shield it from heat.
The space agency has promised a 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week probe that will include studying everything from photos taken by spy satellites to examining every bit of debris recovered from the end of the 16-day scientific mission.
Beside the NASA investigation there will be a separate independent inquiry led by retired Navy Admiral Harold Gehman, who was the co-chairman of an independent commission that investigated the attack on the destroyer USS Cole in Yemen.
NASA officials said the three remaining shuttles are grounded until the cause of the disaster is found and corrected.
The Challenger disaster kept the shuttle fleet from flying for almost three years until its cause - faulty O-ring seals in rocket boosters - was discovered and corrected in a programme that cost billions of dollars.
Government agencies, including the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, joined the investigation and the military was called in to help the search-and-recovery effort.
Keeping the shuttles grounded raised questions about the resupply of the International Space Station because the shuttle is the main resupply vehicle for the space outpost.
The world's other big space power, Russia, sent condolences to Washington, but on Sunday went ahead with the launch of a cargo rocket carrying food and fuel to the space station.
Sergei Gorbunov, a spokesman for Russia's space agency, said work on the $US95 billion station would be reduced until launches of US shuttles, used for major payloads, could be resumed. Gorbunov said he thought shuttles would be grounded "for at least a year," making the station dependent on Russia's Soyuz passenger craft and Progress cargo ship.
The disaster plunged Americans into national grief not felt since September 11, 2001 attacks by hijacked airliners on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. A nation seemingly poised on the brink of war with Iraq and fearful over the state of its economy suddenly had another crisis to ponder.
America was not alone in its heartbreak. The crew of the shuttle Columbia - five men and two women - included Kalpana Chawla, an Indian-born woman, and Ramon, the Israeli.
Ramon, an air force colonel, was a national hero whose exploits aboard Columbia had been followed closely at home. The son of a Holocaust survivor, Ramon was the youngest pilot to take part in an Israeli raid that destroyed an Iraqi nuclear plant.
Heading out to space, Ramon was entrusted with a palm-sized Torah scroll kept safe by a Jewish boy who survived a German concentration camp during World War II. Ramon's five-year-old daughter Noa, in America to welcome her father back from space, was reported to have asked her mother: "How can you die in space? People are supposed to die only on Earth."
In Karnal, India, friends and relatives streamed through the streets to grieve at the house where Chawla, a 41-year-old aerospace engineer, was born.
