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NASA Clears Shuttle Atlantis for Landing This Morning

Posted on: Thursday, 21 September 2006, 06:00 CDT

By Traci Watson

NASA engineers cleared space shuttle Atlantis for landing today, concluding after inspections that an object seen drifting near the vehicle and three more pieces of nearby debris were not a worry.

The Atlantis crew and flight controllers surveyed the spacecraft with cameras late Tuesday and early Wednesday but found no signs of damage from a collision. Nor did they find any evidence that the shuttle is missing any major parts, though engineers strongly suspect that the small, dark object first seen Tuesday came off the shuttle.

"We are cleared for entry," shuttle program manager Wayne Hale said. "So we feel very good that we're in for a good landing opportunity.

Hale said the object, spotted by an engineer in Mission Control, was "most likely" a piece of plastic used to install the shuttle's heat-shield tiles. Technicians use the plastic slip, which is about the size of an index card, as a shim to make sure they leave the correct distance between the tiles.

The shim was dangling from the shuttle's belly during an inspection early in the mission. It was no longer there during Wednesday's inspections.

The three pieces of debris the crew spotted Wednesday could be garbage from the major overhaul Atlantis has received in the past few years, Hale said.

The Atlantis crew had suspected that the objects were debris from the Russian space pod that docked with the International Space Station on Wednesday morning, but Hale said that was unlikely. The Russian pod docked at the station about six hours before the new debris was spotted.

Atlantis astronauts inspected their ship using cameras on an extension to the shuttle's robotic arm. The bits of debris were spotted by crewmembers looking out the shuttle's windows, not by the cameras. Commander Brent Jett told Mission Control that one piece looked like "reflective cloth" and that the others were ring-shaped.

Hale said the pieces probably came off the shuttle, despite NASA's efforts to avoid being a "litterbug." He said the agency would take steps to prevent bits of trash from floating off the shuttle and into orbit.

Landing is scheduled for 6:21 a.m. ET today at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Atlantis has enough supplies to land as late as Saturday, though the clear weather forecast for today made a delay unlikely.

Atlantis was originally scheduled to touch down Wednesday, but managers delayed the shuttle's homecoming so an inspection could be performed.

NASA has become more sensitive to possible damage to the shuttles in orbit since 2003, when shuttle Columbia disintegrated during re-entry. Investigators eventually traced the accident, which killed the crew of seven, to an undetected hole in the heat shield.

The six Atlantis astronauts installed a $370million component on the space station that includes two massive solar panels, which will double the orbiting laboratory's power supply. The mission was the first in nearly four years devoted to finishing the half-built space station.

(c) Copyright 2005 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

Source: USA TODAY

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