HOUSTON - The six-astronaut crew of NASA's shuttle Atlantis will not have
to wedge extra inspections into an already packed flight to the International Space
Station (ISS), NASA officials said late Monday.
"There will be no need for focused
inspections for this mission," NASA commentator Nicole Cloutier-Lemasters
said of the heat shield look as Atlantis' STS-115 astronauts slept in
preparation for their mission's first
spacewalk on Tuesday.
NASA engineers found 495 areas of
interest on Atlantis' heat shield from a detailed
Sunday inspection and high-resolution photographs taken by ISS crewmembers
just before the shuttle docked
at the orbital laboratory today. But nearly all of those areas were cleared by
Monday afternoon.
"The baseline plan, because it was a
little more difficult to execute, was not to do a focused inspection," NASA's
deputy shuttle program manager John Shannon said in a Monday briefing, adding
that he was ready to add an extra day to Atlantis' flight if needed.
The extra day would have been tacked
on between the STS-115 crew's first two spacewalks, Shannon said.
Of their initial interest areas on
Atlantis wing leading edges and tile-covered belly, engineers dismissed 116
outright since they were already on the spacecraft before its Saturday launch
towards the ISS, Shannon said. An additional 318 regions were also found to be
no concern, leaving only 61 items under review this afternoon, he added.
"The initial report was that all of the tile on underside of the orbiter looks great," Shannon said.
The imagery did reveal three bits of
ceramic cloth, known as gap-fillers, jutting out from between the black tiles
on Atlantis' underbelly. Each of the shuttle's external tank doors, which open
to allow connections between Atlantis and its fuel tank near the orbiter's aft,
has a protruding gap-filler, one of which appears to just barely hang on.
"It is almost gone, it is just
barely hanging in there by one little corner," Shannon said of the 1.5-inch (3.8 centimeters)
gap-filler on Atlantis' port external tank door.
A second gap-filler appears nearly
ripped completely from Atlantis' starboard external tank door while a third
gap-filler juts about 0.15 inches (0.38 centimeters) from an area under the
port wing, Shannon said.
"None of these really concern the
team a great deal at this time," Shannon added.
Engineers will continue to study the
gap-fillers to determine how much, if any, extra heating they could generate
aft of their locations during landing. But shuttle officials saw a similar
gap-filler protrusion near one of the external tank doors on the shuttle
Discovery's STS-121
spaceflight in July and do not anticipate concern over those aboard Atlantis.
"This process we honed during
STS-121," Shannon said of the heat shield analysis.
During NASA's first return to flight mission,
following the 2003 Columbia
accident, a spacewalking astronaut did pluck two gap-fillers jutting from
sensitive areas on Discovery's belly as a precaution.
Milestone spacewalk
While engineers pored over heat
shield images on Earth Monday, Atlantis' crew delivered
the $372
million Port 3/Port 4 (P3/P4) truss segments to the ISS with its twin solar
arrays folded away in swing-out boxes.
Commanded by veteran shuttle
flyer Brent Jett, the STS-115 crew will begin its first spacewalk at 5:15 a.m.
EDT (0915
GMT) Tuesday to wire up those trusses to the end of the station's Port 1 (P1)
segment.
STS-115 spacewalkers Joseph
Tanner and Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper
will also ready the two tightly-packed solar arrays for deployment during the
6.5-hour spacewalk. The two astronauts are sleeping inside the space station's
Quest airlock - known as a spacewalk "campout"
- to save time preparing for Tuesday's spacewalk.
"The campout is going exceedingly
well," Kirk Shireman, NASA's deputy ISS program
manager, said Monday, adding that STS-115 is the first mission to use the
protocol.
The P3/P4 truss is the first new
segment to be added to the ISS since late
2002 and currently sits at the end of
the space station's robotic arm. The element is expected to be hoisted into
position by 4:10 a.m. EDT (0810 GMT), with spacewalkers later attaching vital power
lines to ensure its operation.
"We have 34 hours from the time we
start our motion until we have the umbilicals to the
utilities hooked up tomorrow," Kirk Shireman, NASA's
deputy ISS program manager, said Monday. "So we've got plenty of margin."
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