HOUSTON -- Astronauts aboard NASA's space shuttle Discovery will
take a second look and their vehicle's heat
shield today and deploy a pair of tiny satellites while preparing for their
return
to Earth this week.
"We'll be
specifically looking at again the entire area of the wing leading edges and the
nose cap for any micrometeoroid damage or debris damage that may have occurred,"
Tony Ceccacci, NASA's lead shuttle flight director for Discovery's STS-116
mission, said in a Tuesday mission status briefing.
The inspection
is scheduled to begin at about 10:52 a.m. EST (1552 GMT).
Mission managers
have already given Discovery's heat shield a clean
bill of health following the shuttle's Dec.
9 launch, though today's inspection is strictly targeted at identifying any
new concerns spurred by impacts from tiny space
rocks or orbital debris.
"That risk
is 1 in 300 every time we fly," Wayne Hale, NASA's shuttle program manager, has
said of micrometeorites, adding that they are always a concern for spacecraft,
satellites and any other vehicle in low Earth orbit.
NASA has called on its shuttle astronauts
to perform late in section on the last two
orbiter flights, honing the activity in the process to mirror the Flight
Day 2 surveys. Altogether, Ceccacci said, the inspection should take about
five hours.
Meanwhile, imagery
analysts are standing ready to pore through the images returned today, and expect
to deliver a prognosis no later than 24 hours after the last bit of data
reaches Earth, Ceccacci added.
"They
really have the hard job, in a way," STS-116
mission specialist Nicholas Patrick, the prime robotic arm operator aboard
Discovery, said before launch of heat shield imagery analysts. "They're job's
sort of open ended, but ours is very well-defined. It will take most of the
day, and then we hand the data down and say, 'Tell us what we saw.'"
Discovery's
STS-116 crew is nearing the end of a 13-day mission to the International Space
Station that successfully rewired
the orbital laboratory's power system, added a
new piece to its main truss and ferried a new
crewmember for its Expedition
14 mission [image].
The mission is set to end with a Dec. 22 landing at NASA's Kennedy Space Center at 3:56 p.m. EST (1856 GMT).
Springy
satellites
Following
today's heat shield survey, STS-116 mission specialists Joan
Higginbotham and Christer
Fuglesang are due to help deploy a pair of spring-loaded microsatellites
attached to a canister in the aft of Discovery's payload bay.
Known as
MEPSI and RAFT, the small satellites are part of Discovery's Space Test
Program-H2 and are due to be deployed tonight.
MEPSI, which
carries the bulky name of Microelectromechanical System-Based (MEMS)
PICOSAT Inspector, is a coffee-cup sized machine designed to demonstrate the
capability of a low-power spacecraft for inspecting larger vehicles.
Discovery's
crew is due to deploy MEPSI at 7:06 p.m. EST (0006 Dec. 21 GMT), with RAFT --
or Radar Fence Transponder -- to follow at 8:37 p.m. EST (0137 Dec. 21 GMT). The
RAFT satellite is an experimental payload built by students at the U.S. Naval
Academy aimed at testing space surveillance and communications protocols.
A third
microsatellite mission, known as ANDE, is due to be deployed on Thursday. All
three of the vehicles are stowed on Discovery's Integrated Cargo Carrier and sponsored
by the U.S. Department of Defense [image].
"Of course
late inspection is our number one priority," Ceccacci said. "So if that runs
long, everything else gets taken off the plate."
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