Astronauts Pack Up Shuttle Cargo Pod, Inspect Heat Shield

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Astronauts Pack Up Shuttle Cargo Pod, Inspect Heat Shield
The aft section of the docked space shuttle Discovery and the station's robotic Canadarm2 are featured in this image photographed by an STS-131 crew member on the International Space Station. The Red Sea, Sinai Peninsula (center) and Nile River (left) are seen approximately 215 miles below. (Image credit: NASA)

Astronauts on NASA's space shuttle Discovery packed acargo pod back inside their spacecraft's payload bay Friday and took one lastlook at their heat shield to look for any new damage.

The astronauts used the space station's robotic arm to returntheir bus-sizedcargo pod Leonardo to Discovery's payload bay as they prepare to leaveafter more than a week at the orbiting lab.

"We'vegot a lot of work accomplished up here and we still got a little more,"Discovery astronaut Rick Mastracchio told Mission Control as the crew begantheir day. "We look forward to coming home soon."

Discovery'screw stayed up extra late to try and finish as much of the cargo pod move aspossible after finally plucking it free Thursday. To make up for the long day,Mission Control let the astronauts sleep in Friday to rest up.

Aftermoving the Leonardo cargo module, Discovery's astronauts switched robotic arms.They used shuttle's 100-foot (30-meter) combo of its own robotic arm andsensor-tipped inspection pole to search for any signs of new damage to the heatshield panels along their wing edges and nose cap.

Knownas a late inspection, theheat shield survey is a now-standard part every shuttle mission since the2003 Columbia disaster to make sure a shuttle hasn't been damaged frommicrometeorites or space debris.

Thesurvey is usually performed after a space shuttle undocks, but Discovery's crewhad the tricky task of inspecting their heat shield while still linked to thespace station.

A mainantenna failure on April 5, the day Discoverylaunched into space, forced the astronauts to scan their heat shield whileat the space station in order to use the station's antenna to send the massivevideo files of the scan to Mission Control.

NASAengineers on Earth will review the video and data from the heat shield scan tomake sure Discovery is safe to re-enter Earth's atmosphere. The shuttle's heatshield has already been cleared of any concerns related to launch debris.

Discoveryis flying one of NASA's final shuttle missions before thespace shuttle fleet is retired later this year. Only three more missionsare left after this one, each one the last for the shuttle flying on it.

Tariq Malik
Tariq Malik
Editor-in-Chief

Tariq is the award-winning Editor-in-Chief of Space.com and joined the team in 2001. He covers human spaceflight, as well as skywatching and entertainment. He became Space.com's Editor-in-Chief in 2019. Before joining Space.com, Tariq was a staff reporter for The Los Angeles Times covering education and city beats in La Habra, Fullerton and Huntington Beach. He's a recipient of the 2022 Harry Kolcum Award for excellence in space reporting and the 2025 Space Pioneer Award from the National Space Society. He is an Eagle Scout and Space Camp alum with journalism degrees from the USC and NYU. You can find Tariq at Space.com and as the co-host to the This Week In Space podcast on the TWiT network. To see his latest project, you can follow Tariq on Twitter @tariqjmalik.