HOUSTON - Flight controllers for the space
shuttle Discovery are lauding today's morning spacewalk and its successful
repair of the orbiter's heat shield.
During the
six-hour spacewalk, Discovery's STS-114 mission specialist Stephen Robinson
rode a robotic arm under the orbiter's tile-lined belly and used his fingers to
pluck two strips filler material poking out from the spacecraft. The fix all
but cleared the shuttle's heat shield for reentry through the Earth's
atmosphere next week.
"This was the
last thing remaining for us to clear," said Paul Hill, lead shuttle flight
director for STS-114, during a mission status report here at Johnson Space
Center. "So we have a
clean vehicle, pending the blanket discussion."
Engineers
are still examining a damaged thermal
blanket puffing out below the shuttle commander's window, and just above
the 'D' in Discovery along the orbiter's left side.
While the blanket has been cleared for landing from a heating perspective,
engineers want to ensure it won't rip off during descent and strike some aft
portion of the orbiter.
The results
of those studies will be presented to Discovery's Mission Management Team (MMT)
by Thursday at the latest, shuttle officials said.
In the
meantime, spacewalk planners are drawing up contingency plans for a potential
fourth spacewalk should mission managers decide the blanket does pose a problem
and needs to be removed entirely or merely slashed to ventilate it during
reentry, they added.
Regarding
today's extravehicular activity (EVA), spacewalk planners said Robinson's
repair job--which was watched over by his spacewalking partner Soichi Noguchi outside and their crewmate Andrew Thomas
inside the orbiter--went just about as well as they could expect.
"It did
turn out to be as easy as we thought it would be," said Cindy Begley, lead EVA
officer for Discovery's STS-114 flight. "We proved that we can get access to
the bottom of the vehicle, we just never needed to before. Luckily, none of our
other contingency plans were required."
Perched
atop the International Space Station's (ISS) robotic arm, Robinson carried
forceps, scissors and a bent hacksaw to cut off the offending gap-fillers
should they prove too unyielding to the human touch, and was prepared to repair
any damage he accidentally inflicted on the shuttle's fragile tile surface.
Hill said
he felt a wave of relief once Robinson retrieved the second strip and was
backing away from the orbiter.
"It was a
huge relief, like a feeling that it's all downhill from here," he said.
The repair
also proved without a doubt that shuttle astronauts can service the underside
of their vehicles, which is desirable not only for gap-filler fixes, but also
to manually close doors that house the shuttle's connections to its external
tank, "something that was highly desirable for us from the beginning of the
[shuttle] program," Hill said.
Throughout
the entire repair, Robinson's helmet camera broadcast stunning views of
Discovery's tile-covered belly--which he called "a work of art"--and gave flight
controllers they're first views of the shuttle's belly with the entire ISS
hovering above it.
"We've
never seen this before...this was just amazing view for me," Begley said. "The
only time we've ever seen full pictures of the space station are when the
shuttle is approaching station or flying around [it]."
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