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Post-launch inspections on tap for astronauts today BY WILLIAM HARWOOD STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS "SPACE PLACE" & USED WITH PERMISSION Posted: December 10, 2006 The Discovery astronauts were awakened for their first full day in space today by a recording of the Beatles' "Here Comes the Sun" beamed up from mission control around 10:50 a.m. The crew faces a busy day of heat shield inspections and equipment preparation as the shuttle continues its approach to the international space station for a docking Monday afternoon. "Good morning, Discovery, and a special good morning to you, Mark," astronaut Shannon Lucid called from Houston. "We especially want to thank you for the burst of sunshine you brought into our lives last night. It was an awesome launch." "Well good morning, Houston, good morning Shannon and everybody there," shuttle commander Mark Polansky replied. "It was pretty great for all of us, too, and we're really looking forward to getting started today." The primary goal of today's activity is a lengthy inspection of Discovery's nose cap and wing leading edge panels using the 50-foot orbiter boom sensor system, an extension for the shuttle's robot arm equipped with a laser scanner and high-resolution camera. The reinforced carbon carbon wing leading edge panels and the ship's RCC nose cap experience the most extreme heating during re-entry and the flight day 2 inspection is needed to spot any damage that might have occurred during launch. The task takes on added significance for Discovery's flight because takeoff Saturday marked NASA's first night launch since the Columbia disaster. While the brilliant light from the shuttle's twin boosters illuminated the belly of the orbiter during the most aerodynamically dangerous stages of the climb to space, lighting was not optimum for ground-based cameras. The only incident noted by reporters watching replays from a camera mounted on the external tank occurred around 65 seconds after liftoff when something flew through the left side of the frame and out of view well outboard of the orbiter. To the untrained eye, it was not possible to tell if the object was debris of some sort, a rocket nozzle cover coming off late or some other phenomenon. During checkout of the robot arm Saturday night, astronaut Nicholas Patrick ran into a problem with an arm system used to automatically unlatch the snares in the crane's so-called end effector from whatever the arm might be locked onto. After a bit of checkout, engineers determined the arm can be used in its current state but the operator will have to manually release the snares as required, a procedure requiring a few additional computer inputs. But the glitch is not expected to cause any problems. John Shannon, chairman of NASA's Mission Management Team at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, will brief reporters this evening at 8 p.m. on preliminary results of the ascent imagery and other data. A detailed inspection of the shuttle's heat-shield tiles will be carried out by the space station's crew during Discovery's final approach to the outpost Monday afternoon. Here is an updated timeline of today's activities (in EST/GMT and mission elapsed time; includes rev. C of the NASA TV sked): DATE/EST.......DD...HH...MM...EVENT 10:47 AM...00...14...00...Crew wakeup 01:02 PM...00...16...15...Laptop computer setup (part 2) 01:43 PM...00...16...56...NC-2 rendezvous rocket firing 01:47 PM...00...17...00...OBSS unberth 01:47 PM...00...17...00...Logistics transfer preps 02:32 PM...00...17...45...NPC rendezvous rocket firing 03:07 PM...00...18...20...Spacesuit checkout preps 03:12 PM...00...18...25...OBSS surveys starboard wing 03:37 PM...00...18...50...Spacesuit checkout 04:42 PM...00...19...55...OBSS surveys nose cap 04:57 PM...00...20...10...ETVCG assembly 05:12 PM...00...20...25...Ergometer setup 06:12 PM...00...21...25...Crew meals begin 06:12 PM...00...21...25...Centerline camera installation 06:42 PM...00...21...55...Orbiter docking system ring extension 07:12 PM...00...22...25...OBSS surveys port wing 08:00 PM...00...23...13...Post-MMT/mission status briefing on NASA TV 08:12 PM...00...23...25...Spacesuit transfer preps 08:47 PM...01...00...00...OBSS berthing 09:17 PM...01...00...30...Upper surface survey 11:02 PM...01...02...15...Rendezvous tools checkout 11:02 PM...01...02...15...OMS pod survey 11:42 PM...01...02...55...Survey videotape playback 11:51 PM...01...03...04...NC-3 rendezvous rocket firing 02:17 AM...01...05...30...Crew sleep begins 03:00 AM...01...06...13...Daily video highlights reel on NTV 04:00 AM...01...07...13...Status briefing replay 09:00 AM...01...12...13...Video file on NTV The thermal protection system - TPS - inspection on flight day two is a now-standard part of every shuttle mission, requiring the astronauts to unlimber the robot arm, latch onto the OBSS and then make slow, repeated passes up and down each wing's forward edge. As much video as possible from a camera on the OBSS will be downlinked in realtime and video of the entire process will be downlinked later. Data from impact sensors mounted behind the wing leading edge panels, another post-Columbia safety upgrade, was scheduled for downlink overnight. "We don't anticipate any large foam shedding or debris impacts, but it's important to get those data down so we can quickly look at it and we can correlate it with anything we may see on the ascent radar or any video that we get during the first few minutes or at least through the SRB lighted phase of that," lead shuttle flight director Tony Ceccacci said at a pre-flight briefing. Along with inspecting the shuttle's heat shield today, the flight plan "consists of all the standard rendezvous burns and also rendezvous prep activities, which include getting the docking ring extended and also doing rendezvous checkout," Ceccacci said. "The crew will also be doing some EMU (spacesuit) checkouts and doing transfer prep to get them ready for the EVA the day right after we dock. "Again we'll have a full day of TPS surveys, the same thing we've been doing since STS-114. First, we are going to unberth the OBSS and scan the starboard wing. Both the starboard wing, nose cap and port wing take about an hour and half each to complete the actual scanning activities. The actual data that we get from these, that we have the crew record, is about 37 (minutes) on starboard side, 20 minutes on the nose cap and about 29 minutes on the port side. So you see, the majority of it is getting the arm configured. The scan is about a third of the whole time." Once that work is complete, the astronauts will berth the OBSS and use the arm and one of its own cameras to inspect tiles and blankets on the upper sections of the shuttle's crew cabin and aft orbital maneuvering system rocket pods. "After we get done with the LDRI scans, the laser dynamic range imager, we go ahead and berth the OBSS and we do our next set of thermal protection surveys," Ceccacci said. "We call it the crew cabin survey using the RMS end effector. These are areas that don't require the resolution of the LDRI. Once the crew completes this survey, they have one more survey task they have to perform and that's taking video pictures of the OMS pods." At least two rocket firings are planned today to fine-tune Discovery's approach to the space station amid work to check out a variety of tools that will be used during the final stages of the rendezvous to help keep the shuttle on course. "We are essentially checking out hardware that we need to get ready for our rendezvous and docking," astronaut Joan Higginbotham said in a NASA interview. "I specifically will be checking out the handheld laser. We point it towards the station and shoot at it, if you will, and this will tell us how far we are from the station and the range rate, which is the rate at which we are closing in on the station. "We use all that data to dock with our space station, to come in according to the different velocities at which wešre supposed to be tracking at different distances, as wešre closing in," she said. "The EVA crews (Robert Curbeam, Christer Fuglesang and Sunita Williams) are going to be checking out some of the hardware that theyšre going to use on the first spacewalk." As it now stands, Discovery will dock with the space station around 5:05 p.m. Monday.
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