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The Maariv report drew a guarded response from Tim Stevenson, an engineer at the Space Research Centre at Britain's University of Leicester.

In a phone interview with AFP, Mr Stevenson said that although he had not seen the pictures what looked like cracks were possibly a trick of the light.

"You can't see very much of the wing from inside the space station," he said.

"It may be that the shot you see there is of antennas. There are thin wires that run along the hinge of the payload bay doors and (in a picture) they would appear in contrast. They would appear over the wing as a thin line."

He added: "To be honest, the crew would have observed (a big crack) very, very quickly, particularly if it was big enough to be observed in any kind of video footage, and they would have acted very, very differently if they had observed it."

Another point, he said, was that a large, visible crack on the top surface of the wing "would manifest itself as a structural failure very early on.

"Given the point at which NASA said the break-up occurred, the shuttle would have already undertaken its S-turn manoeuvres (to slow its descent), which are relatively stressful.

"To put it bluntly, if the wing was going to break up, it was going to break up a long time before that point," he said.