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Shuttle's heat shield checked for space debris hits BY WILLIAM HARWOOD STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS "SPACE PLACE" & USED WITH PERMISSION Posted: March 22, 2008 The Endeavour astronauts carried out a final heat shield inspection Friday and prepared for a final spacewalk Saturday night to mount the shuttle's inspection boom on the space station's solar power truss for use by the next station assembly crew. Shuttle crews normally carry out so-called "late inspections" after undocking from the station. But the next assembly mission, scheduled for launch in late May, will deliver Japan's huge Kibo laboratory module to the station and there's not enough room in the shuttle Discovery's cargo bay for the module and an inspection boom. So Endeavour' boom will be mounted on the station during a fifth and final spacewalk Saturday and left behind for Discovery's crew to use and bring home. "We had an absolutely fantastic day today," said lead shuttle Flight Director Mike Moses. "This is something we've been working on for a very long time, a lot of people on the ground spent a lot of time getting this docked late inspection ready to go. The crew executed perfectly. They actually went faster than we thought. "The starboard wing (inspection) was a brand new procedure and we literally started by scanning up on top of it and then pulling the arm the whole way out, underneath the orbiter, sticking it under the belly and scanning the bottom half. So that was a very complicated set of maneuvers and to sequence all that together went fantastic." The data collected during the inspection will be analyzed on the ground to make sure Endeavour's critical nose cap and wing leading edge panels have not been struck by orbital debris since a similar inspection the day after launch. Assuming no problems are found, 50-foot-long inspection boom will be mounted on the station's solar power truss. "That sensor boom is going to be left on station because the following mission is going to deliver the next portion of the Japanese laboratory," said spacewalker Robert Behnken in a NASA interview. "That module is a very large module and there's actually not room in the shuttle payload bay to launch both that module and this sensor boom on the same shuttle flight. "So to provide the inspection capability to allow that next shuttle mission to be able to inspect their thermal protection system before they come back for re-entry, they're going to need to have a sensor boom. They can't bring their own and so our flight is going to do an inspection late in the mission and then we'll stow the boom during our EVA 5 on the ISS and hook up the power to it and it'll be all ready for those guys when they actually arrive and install the Japanese module." Behnken and his crewmates were awakened today by a recording of Metallica's "Enter Sandman" radioed up from mission control. "Good morning Endeavour. And good morning to you, Dr. Bob," astronaut Al Drew called from Houston. "Good morning, Alvin. I hope everything's going great down there," Behnken replied. "Thanks for that great wakeup music and I'd like to thank my fiance for choosing that for me. I just want to tell her I miss her and I can't wait to get back and see her here in a couple of days." "Thanks for the good words, Bob. The music has got us awake down here, I'm sure that shook you out of bed as well." "It did, Al. Thanks!" Along with carrying out the late heat shield inspection, the astronauts also plan to move an experiment rack from the U.S. Destiny laboratory to the European Space Agency's new Columbus research lab. The work will take about four hours to complete. "Four hours seems like a long time to move a rack from one location to another," said station Flight Director Ginger Kerrick. "This is a special rack, it has an active rack (vibration) isolation system and there are a lot of individual pieces of hardware that the crew is going to have to remove in order to (move) that rack. A standard rack relocation, you would power down the rack, you would remove all the electrical connectors, you'd remove all the thermal connectors, the vacuum system connectors. But this rack has all those additional pieces of hardware that are designed to isolate the experiments inside from the effects of any (vibration) that may be going on in the space station, for example, running on the treadmill or using the exercise bike." In one other bit of news, Kerrick said engineers are still looking into a glitch involving the Canadian Space Agency's Dextre maintenance robot. During testing after the robot's assembly, one of its joints did not operate as expected. "We positioned arm 2 of the SPDM (special purpose dexterous manipulator) in a good location that would provide the EVA crew access to remove the thermal cover on (the hand of) arm number two," Kerrick said. "After we repositioned the arm, we sent the crew to bed and the ground team proceeded with performing some checkouts that were not performed when we originally relocated SPDM to the lab. And that check out was to test out an alternate power path through the PDGF (lab power and data grapple fixture). We have a primary path and an alternate. We had powered up on the primary and just wanted to make sure the alternate power path worked. "Well, the alternate power path did work. But when we repowered up the SPDM, the shoulder roll joint on its arm number two did not know what position it was in. And this was the exact same joint we had just repositioned for the EVA. We power cycled again and were not able to talk to it. The software gave us the message 'unknown position.' We have some diagnostic tests we can run to help us figure out where inside that roll joint the problem is occurring. But we can't run the diagnostics test until we clear that message. So our CSA counterparts are off investigating whether or not we can uplink a software patch that will clear that message for us so we can run the appropriate diagnostics test. "But for right now, we had no other planned use of the arm. It was in a good config for the EVA. ... So still more work to be done on that, but no impact to the mission." Here is an updated timeline of today's activity (in EDT and mission elapsed time; includes revision I of the NASA television schedule): EDT........DD...HH...MM...EVENT 03/21/08 01:28 PM...10...11...00...Crew wakeup 04:03 PM...10...13...35...Heat shield sensor boom (OBSS) starboard wing survey 04:43 PM...10...14...15...Logistics transfers resume 05:23 PM...10...14...55...Experiment rack 3 transfer 06:33 PM...10...16...05...OBSS laser scan downlink 07:43 PM...10...17...15...OBSS nose cap survey 07:43 PM...10...17...15...OBSS mounting bracket assembly 09:08 PM...10...18...40...Crew meals begin 09:13 PM...10...18...45...OBSS port wing survey 10:23 PM...10...19...55...EVA-5: Tool config 11:00 PM...10...20...32...Mission status briefing on NASA TV 11:18 PM...10...20...50...Airlock prep 03/22/08 12:18 AM...10...21...50...OBSS laser scan downlink 12:58 AM...10...22...30...EVA-5: Procedures review 02:43 AM...11...00...15...EVA-5: Mask pre-breathe/tool config 03:33 AM...11...01...05...EVA-5: Airlock depress to 10.2 psi 03:58 AM...11...01...30...ISS crew sleep begins 04:28 AM...11...02...00...STS crew sleep begins 05:00 AM...11...02...32...Daily video highlights reel on NASA TV 09:30 AM...11...07...02...Flight director update on NASA TV 12:28 PM...11...10...00...Crew wakeup
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Apollo Collage This beautiful one piece set features the Apollo program emblem surrounded by the individual mission logos. U.S. STORE STS-127 Patch  The official embroidered patch for shuttle Endeavour's flight to finish building Japanese section of the space station.U.S. STOREWORLDWIDE STORE Hubble Patch  The official embroidered patch for mission STS-125, the space shuttle's last planned service call to the Hubble Space Telescope, is available for purchase.U.S. STOREWORLDWIDE STOREProject Orion  The Orion crew exploration vehicle is NASA's first new human spacecraft developed since the space shuttle a quarter-century earlier. The capsule is one of the key elements of returning astronauts to the Moon.U.S. STOREFallen Heroes Patch Collection  The official patches from Apollo 1, the shuttle Challenger and Columbia crews are available in the store.U.S. STOREWORLDWIDE STORE |
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