NASA was assessing damage found on Tuesday on the underside of the shuttle Atlantis, but downplayed any threat to the astronauts or their mission as the craft raced toward a risky high-orbit rendezvous with the Hubble telescope.
During a marathon 10-hour survey of fragile heat shielding, the seven-member Atlantis crew found a string of gouges stretching 53cm across four heatshield tiles on the underside of the forward portion of the shuttle’s right wing sustained during the craft’s launch into orbit.
The US space agency characterized the damage, which will undergo at least two days of evaluation by imagery experts in Mission Control, as minor.
PHOTO: REUTERS/NASA TV
“The same amount of damage in another area might be more critical,” LeRoy Cain, who chairs the NASA mission management team, told a news briefing. “The damage itself appears to be relatively shallow, and it’s not a very large area.”
Mission Control ruled out the need for a second and more focused inspection of the damage site on Friday, freeing up more time for Hubble’s overhaul.
“The preliminary assessment is that it does not look too serious,” shuttle communicator Dan Burbank told Atlantis commander Scott Altman from Mission Control.
Atlantis lifted off with seven astronauts on Monday, initiating an 11-day day mission to give the 19-year-old Hubble Space Telescope an optical makeover, equipping the observatory to carry on operations for at least another five years.
The shuttle crew was on course to rendezvous with the 560km high galactic observatory yesterday.
In what will be a nail-biting operation, Altman will steer his ship close to Hubble, as astronaut Megan McArthur reaches out with the shuttle’s robot arm to grab the 13.2m long telescope.
With the observatory in the arm’s grasp, McArthur will mount the telescope upright atop a circular platform in the shuttle’s cargo bay, establishing the work site for the overhaul.
The first of five grueling hours-long spacewalks by the astronauts to upgrade the observatory will then get under way today. During the mission, the spacewalkers aim to install a pair of new science instruments and make unprecedented repairs to the electronic circuitry within an older camera and spectrometer.
NASA experts believe the damage to the shuttle may have occurred about 103 seconds into the space craft’s climb to orbit, the time at which a sensor in the right wing recorded an impact, Burbank said.
Neither the source nor the size and mass of the debris had been identified, but NASA said a camera positioned on the underside of Atlantis and aimed at the shuttle’s external fuel tank may have recorded the source of the impact debris.
NASA has characterized the mission as riskier than the dozen shuttle visits to the International Space Station since the 2003 Columbia tragedy that claimed the lives of seven astronauts.
That disaster was blamed on an undetected breach of the protective heat shields caused by a launch day collision with a breakaway chunk of foam fuel tank insulation.
In the aftermath of the explosion, NASA made heat shield inspections a part of every mission.
Circling Earth much higher than the space station, Hubble is exposed to an accumulation of debris from a satellite collision earlier this year as well as the fragments left from previous spacecraft breakups.
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