Astronauts Scan Space Shuttle For Dings, Damage

This story was updated March 12 at 3:15 a.m. EDT.

Astronauts aboard NASA?s shuttle Endeavour wrapped up their first full day in space by scanning for dings or damage to their spacecraft's heat shield.

Commanded by veteran spaceflyer Dominic Gorie, the astronauts used a laser sensor-tipped extension of the shuttle's robotic arm to scour the orbiter's surface for signs of damage from fuel tank debris that may have fallen free during launch.

Endeavour rocketed spaceward from NASA?s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., Tuesday at 2:28:14 a.m. EDT (0628:14 GMT), and its STS-123 crew is on a marathon 16-day mission to add a new Japanese room and a two-armed Canadian robot to the International Space Station (ISS). The shuttle is due to dock at the orbiting laboratory late Wednesday.

Gorie, shuttle pilot Gregory H. Johnson and mission specialist Takao Doi of Japan finished the roughly six-hour inspection around 3:00 a.m. EDT (0700 GMT). The detailed inspection began at the shuttle's right wing leading edge, moved to the nose cap and wrapped up with the left wing.

As the inspection tool ?? a camera- and sensor-tipped 50-foot (15-meter) extension boom to the shuttle's robotic arm ? swept from the right wing to the nose cap, its cameras caught a pair of unidentified hands waving from windows on the Endeavour's flight deck.

"We can't recognize the hands," said spacecraft communicator Terry Virts from Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, eliciting a chuckle from astronauts on board the spacecraft.

Launch images of Endeavour?s liftoff showed at least one instance of fuel tank foam loss about 83 seconds after launch, but mission managers said they did not think anything struck the orbiter. Mission Control radioed Gorie and his crew this morning to add that there were indications of a potential debris hit at Endeavour?s forward thruster system.

?We know folks are going to be looking at that hard,? Gorie replied. ?We're in great shape, thanks.?

NASA space shuttles are equipped with heat shield tiles and reinforced carbon-carbon (RCC) panels that protect the orbiter's wing edges and nose cap from the searing temperatures of Earth's atmosphere during launch and landing.

"We basically will be inspecting in great detail, every little, tiny little patch of thermal protection system on the shuttle," Johnson, a first-time spaceflyer, said in a NASA interview. "So it?s an all-day task."

The crew must determine that the shuttle's defensive layer is intact before being given the OK to fly the spaceship back to Earth. NASA has kept a close watch on shuttle heat shield integrity since fuel tank debris damaged the shuttle Columbia?s left wing during its 2003 launch, leading to the loss of the orbiter and its crew during landing.

"We are in the process of scanning it and recording it and then downlinking it to the ground, where they do all the hard work and tell us if we?ve got a good vehicle to come home or not," said Gorie, now on his fourth spaceflight.

Experts on the ground will analyze images from data gathered by the boom, formally known as the orbital boom sensing system, once the astronauts finish downlinking the information to Earth.

"The end of OBSS is equipped with various sensor systems and cameras which can detect any damage as small as one-tenth of an inch," said Doi, a veteran astronaut with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). "it?s a very long and delicate operation."

While the inspection was underway, the rest of Endeavour's seven-member crew readied their ride for docking at the ISS, set for Wednesday night at 11:20 p.m. EDT (0320 March 13). Endeavour mission specialists Robert Behnken, Mike Foreman, Rick Linnehan and Garrett Reisman checked the spacesuits slated for use in a Thursday night spacewalk, the first of five planned during their ISS construction flight.

NASA roused the astronauts from sleep at 4:28 p.m. EDT (0828 GMT) with the song "Linus & Lucy" from "A Charlie Brown Christmas," a tune picked especially for mission specialist Mike Foreman.

"Good morning, Houston, we appreciate that song," Foreman said. "We had an exciting trip to orbit yesterday morning and we're looking forward to our first day in orbit."

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SPACE.com staff writer Dave Mosher contributed to this story from Houston, Texas.