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Astronauts inspect heat shield of shuttle Atlantis
BY WILLIAM HARWOOD
STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS "SPACE PLACE" & USED WITH PERMISSION
Posted: November 25, 2009


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The shuttle Atlantis undocked from the International Space Station early Wednesday, carried out a photo-documentation fly around and inspected the ship's critical nose cap and wing leading edge panels to make sure they haven't been damaged since a similar inspection the day after launch.

During a planned waste water dump to offload urine and condensate collected over the past week or so, the astronauts ran into a problem with an apparently clogged discharge line.

"The tank can hold 165 pounds and we only managed to get it down to about 80 pounds of liquid waste on board Atlantis," said Flight Director Mike Sarafin. "We believe there's a blockage in the line that basically vents the waste water out into space and the folks here on the ground are working on that."

A quick look with a camera on the shuttle's robot arm showed no obvious signs of problems with the waste water discharge nozzle on the left side of ship's fuselage.

With the tank only half full, the astronauts have no immediate problem and should be in good shape "as is" through Friday, when Atlantis is scheduled to land back at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

"I'm confident the team will come up with a backup plan should we need to offload that waste tank," Sarafin said. "Right now, we've obviously got some margin in the waste tank. We've done some rough calculations here on the ground and we know we can make it through landing day without having any problems or needing any contingency procedures or in-flight maintenance procedures. It's only if we extend past the planned landing day on Friday that we may have to take additional measures.

"Folks are obviously working those plans right now to see if we can't basically unclog the dump line and see if we can get that tank emptied tomorrow," he said. "The hope is we will be able to get it emptied."

The forecast for landing Friday in Florida calls for light clouds and winds down runway 33 out of 340 degrees at 14 knots with gusts to 21. That works out to a crosswind of just 4 knots or so and a headwind gusting to nearly 21 knots, 4 knots below NASA's limit. Conditions improve Saturday, with lighter winds.

"There's a pretty good chance that we'll come home on Friday," Sarafin said.

The astronauts, meanwhile, pressed ahead with a post-undocking heat shield inspection Wednesday, using a laser scanner and cameras on the end of a 50-foot-long robot arm extension to examine the shuttle's nose cap and wing leading edge panels, which experience the most extreme heating during re-entry.

A similar inspection was carried out the day after launch nine days ago and this final look, a routine feature of post-Columbia shuttle missions, was intended to find any damage that might have occurred due to meteoroid or space debris impacts over the course of Atlantis' mission.

"The folks are using the boom sensor system to sweep and scan up and down the reinforced carbon carbon surfaces on the port and starboard wing as well as the nose cap to make sure Atlantis is ready to come hom following the roughly week on orbit in the orbital debris environment," Sarafin said. "The team on the ground will review that imagery over the next 12 to 24 hours to make a final determination (that) all is well."

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