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Astronauts give Discovery full post-launch inspection
BY WILLIAM HARWOOD
STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS "SPACE PLACE" & USED WITH PERMISSION
Posted: August 29, 2009


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The Discovery astronauts conducted an inch-by-inch inspection of the most critical sections of the shuttle's heat shield Saturday, examining the ship's nose cap and wing leading edge panels with a laser scanner on the end of a 50-foot-boom attached to the shuttle's robot arm.


Credit: NASA TV
 
No obvious problems stood out, but it will take engineers several more days to complete the normal post-Columbia assessment of launch imagery, the laser scans carried out Saturday and close-up photos of Discovery's belly during final approach to the International Space Station Sunday evening before the heat shield is given a clean bill of health.

Docking with the International Space Station is targeted for around 9:04 p.m. EDT Sunday. As with all shuttle-station dockings, commander Frederick "C.J." Sturckow will approach from directly in front of the lab complex, manually guiding the shuttle the final 400 feet or so to a linkup with a port on the front end of the Harmony module.

But Sturckow will have a bit of an added challenge Sunday. He won't be able to use the shuttle's small vernier jets for fine attitude control because of an apparent leak in one of two small thrusters in the ship's nose. Because of the presumed leak, engineers asked the crew to close a manifold earlier Saturday to isolate the leak, taking both forward jets off line for the duration of the mission.

"We had one of our vernier jets, F5R, fail-leak last evening," lead flight director Tony Ceccacci told reporters early Sunday. "Basically, the signatures that we saw were somewhat interesting, I have to admit. I was an ex prop (propulsion officer in mission control) and what I saw didn't quite make sense. But what we did this morning after the crew woke up, we did close that manifold, No. 1, just to safe the system. We wanted to make sure the manifold was evacuated and didn't cause any contamination concerns to the station.

"Even in the loss-of-vernier case, the crew is well trained to press through the rendezvous sequence, the prox ops (proximity operations) part of it. We actually had a quick tag up with C.J. today on what to expect and what differences he will have without vernier jets."

The shuttle's forward reaction control system, or RCS, includes 14 primary engines and two vernier jets. Two aft RCS pods feature 12 primary thrusters and two verniers each. The primary engines generate 870 pounds of thrust while the verniers produce just 24 pounds of push.

Without the verniers, "the crew just has to be a little bit more careful," Ceccacci said. Using the more powerful primary jets during final approach requires "just a little bit more piloting" than usual, "but nothing that's outside of our experience or what we train the crew."

Once docked, the orientation, or attitude, of the combined shuttle-station "stack" is typically controlled by the station's four control moment gyroscopes, assisted from time to time by the shuttle's vernier jets. Because of the F5R failure, Russian thrusters will be used for major changes.

"There were some other things we were looking at in the event we had to do a debris avoidance maneuver, what the best scenario and configuration would be, whether it would be on the Russian thrusters or going to the alt-DAP (digital autopilot) on the primary jets," Ceccacci said. "The folks are taking a look, making sure we have good solar array configurations, making sure that we meet all the loads constraints and such. But we have work-arounds to deal with that failure."

Along with inspection the nose cap and wing leading edge panels Saturday, the Discovery astronauts checked out two spacesuits that will be used later in the mission by John "Danny" Olivas and Christer Fuglesang. Early Sunday, the crew planned to test their rendezvous tools and prepare the orbiter docking system for operation before going to bed at 5:29 a.m.

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