NASA's space shuttle Atlantis appears
to be in good health after weathering what is now Tropical Storm Ernesto, and is once
more being primed for a September launch at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
"There's no
damage that we can find anywhere as of yet," NASA spokesperson George Diller,
at KSC, told SPACE.com, adding that the shuttle could fly sometime
next week. "We're still looking at no earlier than Wednesday."
Atlantis
could launch its six-astronaut
crew towards the International
Space Station (ISS) on Sept. 6, 7 or 8 to deliver new
solar arrays and a pair of 17.5-ton pair of trusses to the orbital outpost.
To do that, the shuttle must be ready to begin countdown operations as early as
Sunday, or else await a planned ISS crew change later this month, NASA said.
Ernesto
passed over KSC Wednesday with peak winds reaching 44 miles per hour (70
kilometers per hour) at about 4:45 p.m. EDT (2045 GMT) that afternoon, Diller
said. By 12:30 a.m. EDT (0430 GMT) Thursday the area was cleared for normal
operations, with the first scheduled shift of KSC workers arriving at 7:00 a.m.
EDT (1200 GMT), he added.
Ernesto weakened to a tropical depression as it approached KSC, but has since grown stronger as it crosses Atlantic Ocean waters on course towards the Carolinas, the National Hurricane Center reported today.
NASA
spokesperson Katherine Trinidad told SPACE.com Wednesday that Atlantis,
should it launch on Sept. 8, would have to undock no later than Sept. 17 to
avoid conflicts with the planned ISS crew change. That means the shuttle would
lose the option for an extra docked day at the ISS during Atlantis' STS-115
mission, though extra days are available if the shuttle launches on Sept. 6 or
7, Trinidad said.
Atlantis' orbital
departure would allow a three-day buffer between visiting spacecraft at the ISS
to give the station crew time for rest and preparation.
During the
upcoming crew
swap, a Russian Soyuz spacecraft is expected to launch the station's
Expedition 14 crew and a space tourist towards the ISS on Sept. 18, with
docking planned for Sept. 20. The outpost's current Expedition
13 crew would then return to Earth with the spaceflight participant, U.S.
entrepreneur Anousheh Ansari, on Sept. 29.
NASA's STS-115
mission has been delayed several times this month. A lightning
strike and subsequent
spacecraft checks at the orbiter's Pad 39B launch site last week prevented
planned space shots on Sunday and Monday, while Ernesto's Florida pass scrubbed
a Tuesday launch attempt.
Atlantis'
flight will mark the first major ISS construction mission since late 2002.
It is the orbiter mission to launch since the 2003 Columbia accident and the
first to follow two post-accident test flights - STS-114 in 2005 and last month's
STS-121
- to evaluate shuttle flight safety improvements.
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