CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - Shuttle Endeavour soared into space Friday with a mysterious black spot on its 15-story external tank, and engineers are trying to determine whether foam insulation might have fallen off the fuel reservoir in flight.
NASA video replays show a dark spot about three-quarters of the way up the back side of the tank, which was filled with a half-million gallons of explosive liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen prior to the shuttle's 12:43 p.m. launch.
"There's certainly no indication that it was any sort of near-miss," said John Ira Petty, a spokesman for NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.
Square in shape, the dark spot was readily apparent in the so-called "intertank" region of the bullet-shaped fuel reservoir.
The cylindrical intertank is a steel-and-aluminum structure with flanges on either end that join liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen tanks within the reservoir. It also houses instrumentation and an umbilical plate that hooks up to ground support equipment.
The black mark looks as if it is located near a square door that enables workers to access intertank instrumentation. It appears as if orange foam insulation on the door might have fallen off shortly after Endeavour's earthshaking liftoff.
NASA engineers, however, still are trying to unravel the mystery.
Said Petty: "We're looking at what it might have been, but we don't have any answers right now."
As with any shuttle launch, the massive fuel tank was jettisoned shortly after Endeavour's crew reached orbit and was destroyed during a fiery plunge back through Earth's atmosphere.
NASA engineers, consequently, will rely on launch videos and still photographs - as well as manufacturing and processing records - to determine exactly what happened and whether the crew was ever in danger.
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