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Space shuttle crew scans for damage

Posted on: Friday, 29 July 2005, 19:05 CDT

By Irene Klotz

HOUSTON (Reuters) - The space shuttle Discovery crew examined damage to the craft's heat shield with laser scanners on Friday while NASA's chief on the ground expected engineers would quickly fix the fuel tank problems that have again grounded the fleet.

"We were actually quite surprised to hear we had some large pieces of debris fall off the external tank," Discovery commander Eileen Collins said during the crew's first in-flight interview. "It wasn't what we had expected."

During Discovery's launch on Tuesday on NASA's first shuttle mission since the 2003 Columbia disaster, a chunk of foam nearly as large as the one responsible for downing Columbia fell off Discovery's fuel tank. A smaller chunk of foam also broke off and is believed to have hit Discovery's wing, but did not cause any damage, deputy program manager Wayne Hale said.

Columbia was destroyed because a 1.67-pound (0.75-kg) chunk of falling insulating foam damaged heat panels on the ship's left wing, allowing superheated gases to blast into the structure as the shuttle flew through the atmosphere for landing on Feb. 1, 2003. Seven astronauts died when Columbia broke up over Texas.

Discovery arrived at the International Space Station, orbiting 220 miles above Earth, on Thursday for what was expected to be an eight-day joint mission.

Hale said Friday NASA likely would extend Discovery's stay one day to transfer additional items to the outpost. Station managers requested some shuttle gear, such as a computer and additional oxygen and food, because the September shuttle mission to the outpost likely will be delayed while NASA resumes work on the shuttle fuel tank problem.

"We don't expect this to be a long drawn-out affair," NASA administrator Michael Griffin said in a teleconference with reporters.

On Friday, the Discovery crew used robotic arms aboard both the shuttle and the station to position a 50-foot (15-meter) boom outfitted with laser imagers to look at six damaged areas of the heat shield that protects the shuttle's underside.

Engineers believe the shuttle is in good shape to return to Earth on Aug. 7 or Aug. 8, but wanted additional information about the size and depth of six damage sites, Hale said.

The Discovery crew also prepared for the first of three spacewalks planned during the flight. Astronauts Steve Robinson and Soichi Noguchi are scheduled for a six-hour spacewalk on Saturday at 4:44 a.m. EDT (0844 GMT) to test heat shield repair techniques and to begin installing a new gyroscope.

The gyroscope is part of a system that keeps the outpost properly oriented in space without depleting the station's limited supply of rocket fuel.

NASA has said it will not fly any more missions until the shuttle tank debris problems are fixed, leaving the Russians solely responsible for delivering cargo to the outpost.

"We said this was a test flight," Griffin said. "We said that because of the physics involved, the nature of the problem, that we could not test this tank on the ground, in a wind tunnel, in any other type of facility. We had to put it back into flight to see how well we had done.

"We have hugely reduced damage to the orbiter," he said, noting that imaging experts had identified about 25 minor nicks in Discovery's heat shield, compared to an average of 150 on previous shuttle missions.

NASA had planned to fly shuttle Atlantis on the second of two test flights in September. The agency has one other opportunity this year to launch a shuttle to the International Space Station and Griffin refused to concede that the shuttle fleet will miss those dates.

"We don't start out by assuming we can't succeed," he said. "My gut feel is that this is something that can be addressed relatively quickly," said former astronaut Richard Covey, who co-chaired the task force that oversaw NASA's implementation of safety recommendations made by Columbia accident investigators.

"That's what you do when you do test flights," he said. "You learn and then you go fix and then you fly again."

Source: REUTERS

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