HOUSTON — The modified fuel tank that fed the space shuttle
Discovery's main engines during its weekend launch performed well based on preliminary examinations, NASA officials said
Sunday.
Discovery
launched Saturday with the first external fuel tank built from scratch with
all the changes planned after the 2003 Columbia disaster. The new tank was
designed to release as little falling debris as possible during launch, since
falling foam from the external tank on Columbia damaged that orbiter's
sensitive heat shield and led to its demise.
"We worked very hard on the modifications that were in
place," LeRoy Cain, STS-124's mission management team chair, said in a briefing
here at Johnson Space Center on Sunday. "We feel very good about the
performance of the tank."
Discovery lifted off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in
Cape Canaveral, Fla. at 5:02 p.m. EDT (2102 GMT) on Saturday, carrying the Japanese
Kibo laboratory to the International Space Station (ISS).
The seven STS-124
crewmembers completed a preliminary scan of their vehicle's heat tiling in some
sensitive areas, such as the leading edges of its wings. The inspection hasn't
turned up any major problem areas so far, but the data still need to be
analyzed in detail.
"It was just a quick inspection, as much as we could with what we have," said mission specialist Karen Nyberg during a televised interview today.
The results of the survey, in combination with
observations and photos of Discovery's external tank and orbiter during launch,
indicate that the new design of the tank has been successful.
"We do have a couple areas where we lost some foam, and
we're still doing some analysis," Cain said. "There are some areas that we will
be looking at, but in a broader sense the tank absolutely performed in a
magnificent fashion."
About five pieces of foam debris were seen
to fall from the external tank during Discovery's launch. Mission managers say
they don't think these were likely to have damaged the orbiter because they
appeared to be lightweight and they fell relatively late during the liftoff, so
they wouldn't have built up enough velocity to pose a great threat.
"We don't consider those a big deal to us," Bill Gerstenmaier,
NASA's space operations chief, said Saturday after the liftoff.
Today's heat shield scan was only a cursory one, because
the laser tool usually used for the inspection following launch was not aboard
the shuttle. Discovery's sensor-tipped boom is waiting for it on the space
station, because the shuttle didn't have room to carry the long pole in its
payload bay, which was almost completely filled by the massive
Kibo lab.
"The inspection went absolutely wonderfully," Matt
Abbott, lead flight director at NASA, said Sunday. "We got exactly what we were
expecting to get."
The crew will perform a more exhaustive scan on Friday after
they have reclaimed their sensor-tipped boom. This detailed inspection will
make sure Discovery hasn't suffered damage that could harm it during its
descent back to Earth.
The astronauts will spend the rest of the day preparing to
dock with the space station, which is planned for tomorrow at 1:54 p.m. EDT
(1754 GMT).
NASA is broadcasting the planned launch of
Discovery's STS-124 mission live on NASA TV on Saturday. Click here for SPACE.com's
shuttle mission updates and NASA TV feed.
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