LAT: Shuttle Viewed with Critical Eye (three debris incidents studied)

[DeepModem Mom]

(Mods: I have used the headline for this article on the LAT homepage. It better reflects the subject of the article, which has changed since the original article under this headline.)

Discovery, NASA Return to Space
By John Johnson Jr. and Michael Muskal, Times Staff Writers

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. -- Hours after the United States successfully launched the space shuttle Discovery today, NASA said it was closely examining three incidents involving debris on the first manned flight since the Columbia disaster more than two years ago....

***

John Shannon, shuttle flight operations manager, told a Houston news conference this afternoon that initial analysis showed that the launch appeared clean. But there were at least three incidents that required more study, including what appeared to be a 1½-inch chip of thermal tile that may have come from under Discovery's nosecone, he said.

It was not known how serious the incident was, said Shannon, who added that the crew would be able to examine the area later in the flight.

NASA said a camera on the shuttle also spotted what looked like a piece of debris from the external fuel tank about two minutes into the flight.

Officials played the tape showing the unidentified object that missed the shuttle as the craft separated from the external tank. The tape lacked perspective, so officials said they couldn't determine whether it was a small object up-close to the camera or a large piece farther away.

"The big question is, what is that?" Shannon said....

(On edit: The third incident was the killing of a bird by the shuttle.)

http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-072605shuttle_lat,0,900349.story?coll=la-home-headlines


Adding LAT/AP:

NASA Studies Debris Recorded During Launch
By JEFF DONN, Associated Press Writer

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- In uneasy reminders of the Columbia accident, a thermal tile apparently got chipped and other debris whirled around Discovery as it rumbled toward space Tuesday, but it wasn't clear if the shuttle's sensitive skin had been jeopardized.

A 1 1/2-inch-wide bit of tile captured on camera appeared to fly off the shuttle's belly, on the edge of a door that encloses the nose landing gear. It was not clear if the tile had been struck by anything. Pieces of tile, which protect the shuttle from searing heat on return to Earth, have been lost on past flights without preventing a safe homecoming.

"We're going frame-by-frame through the imagery," said John Shannon, a NASA operations manager.

Also, NASA video revealed what appeared to be a sizable piece of material -- maybe a chunk of insulation -- coming off the shuttle's external fuel tank two minutes into flight. It did not strike the orbiter that carries the seven astronauts, the NASA manager said. Other agency footage showed covers flying off Discovery's thrusters -- something expected to happen.

NASA managers said they would take several days to make a full judgment of any damage to the shuttle and decide how to deal with it....

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/wire/ats-ap_top10jul26,0,247535.story

[Xipe Totec]

1. There is only one word you want to hear from NASA right now:

Nominal.

Everything is nominal.

Flight is nominal.

Crew is nominal.

Nominal, nominal, nominal.

Godspeed, Discovery!

[Deja Q]

2. Good Lord... don't tell me this latest crew is doomed too?! And where in

hell are they manufacturing these components anyway? Oh yeah, China...

Let me know when they do a 2006 flight. Maybe they can rig it to blow up like the one in 1986 had. x( x( x( x( x(

[Emperor_Norton_II]

5. Dude! Chill!

The shuttle's not doomed, ferchrissakes! The big whatsit missed by a country mile and the only thing missing is a freakin' divot. They get to the station, check it out and everything will be fine. Okay?

[Warren Stupidity]

3. Sheesh

Well at least this time they are looking for this sort of damage and are supposedly prepared to deal with it.

I've done a 180 on the shuttle. I used to think it was one of the few things we did well. Now I think it is an obsolete creaky dinosaur that should have been replaced 10 years ago. I dreaded this launch.

[wschalle]

8. When you think about it...

The shuttle is extremely well built. Everything about it is triply redundant, except the human part. Serious accidents do happen sometimes though, and there are a few cases which you just can't do a damn thing about. Sometimes it just doesn't work right. We can plan forever and still have mishaps.

[Piperay]

4. Even for something like the shuttle

this country goes on the cheap. :-(

[DeepModem Mom]

6. From CNN: "Didn't expect to eliminate all falling debris"

NASA's flight operations manager, John Shannon, said it was too soon to determine the source of the debris, how large any possible defect might be and whether it poses any safety threat for the spacecraft.

"We did not come into this flight expecting to eliminate" all falling debris, he said at an evening news briefing at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. "But we knew that we had the tools available to us to characterize it."

He said the initial estimate of the debris showed it could be about 1.5 inches.

In addition to the possible piece of tile, video showed a piece of debris falling from the external fuel tank as it separated from the orbiter, Shannon said.

The piece did not strike the shuttle, he said.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/space/07/26/space.shuttle/index.html

[DeepModem Mom]

7. From NYT: "Intense Hunt for Signs of Damage Could Raise Problems of Own"

Intense Hunt for Signs of Damage Could Raise Problems of Its Own
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
Published: July 27, 2005

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., July 26 - Now that the Discovery is in orbit, the examination begins. Its 12½-day mission will be the most photographed in the history of the shuttle program, with all eyes on the craft to see if it suffered the kind of damage from blastoff debris that brought down the Columbia in February 2003.

There were cameras on the launching pad, cameras aloft on planes monitoring the ascent, cameras on the shuttle checking for missing foam on the external fuel tank, and a camera on the tank itself. One camera caught a mysterious object falling from the shuttle at liftoff; radar detected another, about two minutes into the flight. Cameras aboard the shuttle and the International Space Station will monitor the Discovery until the end of its mission.

But all this inspection may be a mixed blessing. The more NASA looks for damage, engineers and other experts say, the more it will find. And the risks of overreaction to signs of damage while the shuttle is in orbit may be just as great as the risks of playing them down.

"How do you distinguish - discriminate - between damage which is critical and damage which is inconsequential?" asked Dr. David Wolf, an astronaut who spent four months aboard the Russian space station Mir. "We could be faced with very difficult decisions, in part because of all this additional information that we will be presented with."

The shuttle program has lived with damage from debris from the very first flight, in 1981; in 113 missions the orbiters have been hit by debris some 15,000 times, mostly on liftoff. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration replaces about 100 insulating tiles after every flight and repairs many more than that, Stephanie S. Stilson, the vehicle manager for Discovery, said Monday....

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/27/science/space/27damage.html?hp&ex=1122436800&en=9de4b7226fdfbaf1&ei=5094&partner=homepage