![]() ![]() All the pictures and data collected during the first three days of the flight came up empty.īy the time Endeavour leaves next week, the space station will be 98 percent complete. The good news Wednesday was that Endeavour’s heat shield looks to be free of any major launch damage. The wing was smacked by a piece of fuel-tank foam insulation that broke off at liftoff, and the extent of the damage was not known until the shuttle broke apart during re-entry. NASA has been extra careful about such matters ever since Columbia was brought down by a cracked wing in 2003. “So we’ll let the team go off and do the work.” “We have more questions than answers at this point,” Cain said. They could inadvertently create a worse problem if they damaged the sensitive equipment, Cain said at a news conference. NASA would prefer not sending astronauts out to work near the cockpit windows and other critical systems. Another two to three days of analyses are needed. Engineers are trying to determine whether the spacer might come loose during re-entry and, if it did, whether it would slam into the rudder or orbital-maneuvering rockets.Ĭain said it’s too soon to know whether Behnken and his spacewalking partner, Nicholas Patrick, would need to attempt repairs. Then there’s the round ceramic spacer near one of the cockpit windows that’s sticking out. The yellow circle highlights an area on Endeavour's thermal tile where a repaired crack is causing fresh concern. The unexpected shuttle problems grabbed management’s attention Wednesday.Ī thermal tile repair that was made before the flight has failed, and the original crack is back, right over the cockpit. It’s conceivable excess calcium in their urine is clogging the machine, but officials believe the system itself is also to blame. The repair work is such a high priority that it began within hours of the shuttle’s arrival early Wednesday.Īstronauts can suffer considerable bone loss in weightlessness. Endeavour took up replacement parts as well as a filter to catch all the calcium deposits in the urine. The most important job - installing a new room and an observation deck at the International Space Station - will get under way during Thursday night’s spacewalk, the first of three.Īs for the space station’s water recycling system, the urine processor has been acting up for months. So he borrowed the upper part of a suit already on the space station. Shuttle astronaut Robert Behnken’s spacesuit was unusable because of a faulty harness that prevented him from turning on his glove heaters and operating his helmet camera. They overcame a spacesuit problem in advance of Thursday night’s spacewalk and replaced broken parts in a system that turns astronauts’ urine into drinking water. As engineers on the ground scrambled to understand the problems and determine whether repairs were needed, the 11 astronauts aboard the linked space shuttle and space station spent a relatively quiet first day together.
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