This
story was updated at 11:39 a.m. ET.
CAPE
CANAVERAL, Fla. — Dreary Florida coast weather might push back a planned
Thursday launch of the space shuttle Atlantis and its seven-astronaut crew,
NASA mission managers said today.
NASA's
100-ton spaceship is scheduled to launch on Feb. 7 at 2:45 p.m. EST (1945 GMT).
Kathy Winters, the shuttle weather officer here at Kennedy Space Center (KSC), said
conditions through Wednesday will be good but rain showers and low-hanging clouds
expected on Thursday are lowering launch day expectations.
"By
launch day, unfortunately ... we do have a chance of having some bad
weather," Winters said, who gave Atlantis a 40 percent chance of taking off
on Thursday. She said any precipitation could damage
the thermally shielded belly of Atlantis as the spaceship
rockets to more than 17,500 mph (28,200 kph) to reach orbit.
"We
don't want to trigger a lightning strike," Winters said of the expected
low-hanging clouds. Should unfavorable weather move mission managers to
scrub the first launch attempt, she said conditions will improve vastly
for a try on Friday or Saturday.
Issues
ironed out
Other than
the fickle Florida coast weather, NASA test director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson
said there are no outstanding issues with the orbiter for launch.
"Atlantis
is ready to go fly and our team is prepared," Blackwell-Thompson said, but
noted the agency will be keeping a close eye on a Freon-filled
coolant hose within the payload bay of Atlantis. Technicians found the hose
bent out
of place last week and enacted a fix over the weekend using a V-shaped
tool.
"It
pretty much went to plan," she said of the fix on Sunday. "We didn't
have any issues with it at all."
The kinked
hose discovery came just short of two months after NASA found two faulty fuel
tank sensors during pre-launch testing, ultimately prompting mission managers
to delay
Atlantis' launch to February.
The four
engine cutoff (ECO) sensors, as they are known, ensure that
cryogenically-cooled fuel in the 15-story external fuel tank of the space
shuttle stops flowing before it runs out. Although the system is a backup for a
primary on-board system, engineers made a fix by removing the devices, permanently
soldering some troublesome connections together and reinstalling them.
Ready to
fly
Commanded
by Stephen Frick, a former Navy captain and veteran spaceflyer, the crew of
STS-122 will bring a 10.3-ton European laboratory to the International Space
Station (ISS). During their 11-day mission, the astronauts will also swap crew
members at the ISS and set up experiments outside of the soon-to-be-attached
lab.
Frick
arrived today at KSC today at 10:29 p.m. EST (1529 GMT) along with the rest of
the STS-122 crew: shuttle pilot Alan Poindexter, mission specialists Leland
Melvin, Rex Walheim and Stanley Love, and European astronauts Leopold Eyharts
and Hans Schlegel.
"We're
feeling very good about this opportunity," Frick told members of the press
from the tarmac, just after he and his crew arrived from Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. "We'll keep looking at the weather, but we're very happy
about the condition of Atlantis."
Frick
explained that rather than being frustrated at a flight delayed by two months,
he was glad the time was used to resolve the ECO sensor issues.
"The
ECO sensor problem has been nagging us for a very long time. We really rely on
them," Frick said. "We use virtually all of our gas just to get up to
orbit just for a normal mission, like 99.5 percent, and we can't afford to let
the engines run dry because they tend to come apart."
NASA is set
to start the three-day countdown for Atlantis' launch at 5:00 p.m. EST (2200
GMT) this evening.
NASA will broadcast Atlantis' STS-122 mission live on NASA TV. Click here for SPACE.com's STS-122 mission coverage and NASA TV feed.
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