NASA
engineers have drawn up a plan to stow a kinked radiator hose aboard the shuttle
Atlantis as the agency gears up for a Thursday launch toward the International
Space Station (ISS).
Wielding a
V-shaped pole, a shuttle technician will gently prod the bent hose back into a
compartment inside Atlantis' payload bay, said NASA spokesperson Allard Beutel
of the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla.
"In tests,
it went really well," Beutel told SPACE.com, adding that the fix is not
expected to impact Atlantis' planned Feb. 7 launch. "They've been practicing
this since Wednesday."
Shuttle workers
will perform the repair on Sunday, with the technician climbing inside Atlantis'
60-foot (18-meter) payload bay at the start, then squeezing out of the cargo
hold before its shell-like doors are closed for launch. The shuttle's payload
bay doors will be closed about 12 hours earlier than planned to allow extra cushion
should the repair run long, Beutel said.
Commanded
by veteran shuttle flyer Stephen Frick, Atlantis' STS-122
mission to the ISS has been delayed since early December due to glitches
with fuel tank level sensors that have since
been resolved. The shuttle is scheduled to launch Thursday at 2:45 p.m. EST
(1945 GMT) on an 11-day flight to ferry a new crewmember and the European
Space Agency's Columbus laboratory to the orbiting space station.
Engineers
discovered the kinked Freon hose, which is bent the wrong way, late Tuesday
after finding a similar glitch on Atlantis' sister ship Discovery. The hose is
part of the shuttle's cooling system and engineers were initially concerned that it might
develop a leak once in space.
Atlantis,
however, has a backup cooling system that could be used should any leak occur,
mission managers said late Wednesday. But aside from being misaligned, the
radiator hose is currently undamaged and leak-free, they added.
Frick and
his crewmates are currently in quarantine at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston to avoid catching any last-minute illnesses. They are scheduled to
arrive at the agency's KSC spaceport on Monday morning for final countdown
preparations.
"Right now,
there is no effect to the overall timeline," Beutel said of the hose repair.
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