Space shuttle Endeavour's will spend an extra days in space

Space shuttle Endeavour's will spend an extra days in space NASA mission managers decided Sunday, as astronauts inspected the ship for damage to a heat shield that occurred during launch.

Astronauts used the Canadian robotic arm, Canadarm, to inspect a seven-centimetre gash on the ship’s underside. The crew collected images of five areas on Endeavour’s underside that may have been damaged during the climb to orbit on Wednesday.

The scans by the shuttle’s laser and high-resolution video cameras should yield a three-dimensional portrait of the damage caused by the chunk of foam that fell off Endeavour’s fuel tank about a minute after liftoff. The data collected during the inspection will be analyzed by experts and engineers at the Mission Control Center in Houston.

The shuttle arrived at the International Space Station Friday for a resupply mission.

NASA believes the damage is minor, but following the loss of the shuttle Columbia crew in 2003 from a similar incident, the space agency wanted to make certain the shuttle was in good shape for re-entry.

Teacher-turned-astronaut Barbara Morgan began the scan operating the 100-foot-long boom from a control station on Endeavour’s flight deck.

If the damage is deemed too great, the astronauts will have to undertake another space walk to repair the damage.

The shuttle is designed to allow some insulation debris from its fuel tanks to fly from the ship at every launch. However, the Columbia disaster prompted NASA to try and curb this issue.

The disintegration of the Columbia was put down to a briefcase-sized piece of flying tank foam that struck Columbia’s wing during launch and put a sizable hole in the heat shield.

The damage went undetected, which is why NASA now conducts at least three damage inspections during each flight, including the photos taken by the station crew as the shuttle approaches for docking.

Though managers believe the gash is not a safety hazard, they ordered an extra inspection to gather more information.

“We don’t think it (the debris impact) went all the way down to the bottom” of the tile, John Shannon, deputy shuttle program manager and head of the mission management team, told reporters late Saturday.


“If we even have half the tile left, then we’re not going to have any issues at all,” he added.


The shuttle is covered with ceramic heat-resistant tiles and carbon panels to protect its aluminum skin from melting during the plunge back through the atmosphere for landing. Temperatures around the damage site can reach up to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

NASA has twice redesigned the tank since Columbia to minimize foam shedding and has one more fix in the works that will be ready next year. That should rectify an ongoing problem with foam falling off a bracket that holds an oxygen feed line.


Resource:
canada.com