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Schedule interrupted to image shuttle's port wing BY WILLIAM HARWOOD STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS "SPACE PLACE" & USED WITH PERMISSION Posted: December 11, 2006 The Discovery astronauts and their station counterparts interrupted their timeline tonight to make a quick inspection of the shuttle's left wing leading edge panels. Astronaut Steve Robinson in space station mission control told the crew an accelerometer in the shuttle's wing leading edge sensor system, part of a post-Columbia safety upgrade, had recorded a possible hit overnight.
"We're going to take advantage of the timeline here and perform an inspection of opportunity," Robinson said. "We'd like to take a look at the port wing tip with the SSRMS (station's robot arm). Overnight, the WLES system, a single accelerometer gave us a signal on what we think is the locations of RCC panels on the port side, 19 through 22." The astronauts had been in the process of gearing up to unberth a new space station truss segment using the shuttle's robot arm. The plan then was to hand it off to the station arm, which would hold it overnight. The segment, known as P5, is scheduled to be attached to the station's main solar array truss during a spacewalk Tuesday. "Before we do the handoff, we'd like to take the SSRMS out and take a look at it," Robinson said, referring to the outboard panels making up the shuttle's left wing leading edge. "The idea is go ahead and do the shuttle grapple of P5 on time but not to unberth it." The shuttle's reinforced carbon carbon nose cap and wing leading edge panels - 22 per wing - experience the most extreme heating during re-entry and one of NASA's post-Columbia requirements is to inspect the panels in orbit to assess their health. The astronauts did just that Sunday, using cameras and a laser sensor on the end of a 50-foot boom. At that time, there were no obvious signs of any ascent damage. The WLES system was put in place in the wake of Columbia to detect the sort of forces one might expect from wing leading edge debris impacts during launch or from micrometeoroid impacts during orbital flight. Herring said the sensors can occasionally produce "false positives" and the area of interest on the left wing may turn out to be nothing of any concern. Herring said the relatively low-energy reading was recorded around 5:30 a.m. today while the crew slept. Tonight's unplanned inspection, he said, "should be only about a half-hour impact on the schedule." The astronauts then will press ahead with unberthing P5 while analysts on the ground study the imagery.
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