Endeavour: tile damage

[Dr Mordrid]

The shuttle Endeavour arrived at ISS on its last mission to discover tile damage on its heat shield. The damage once again seems to be caused by pieces of insulating foam shed by the external fuel tank during launch. Images of some damaged tiles with measurements below. Their depth is unknown, but laser scans could give an idea later. No decision yet as to if repairs will have to be made.

Map

[degrub]

Don't they learn ???

"Given the history of Endeavour's "hurricane tank," mission managers expected to see more foam insulation falling away during the climb to space than usual because not all of the post-Columbia tank improvements were carried out for the repaired tank."

http://www.cbsnews.com/network/news/space/home/spacenews/files/b5bbb0e089dc4cf7cb8eb5bfd03f976f-244.html

[Dr Mordrid]

Don't they learn ???

No, they don't and there are a ton of NASA managers, congressmen etc. who still think shuttle should not be cancelled and are openly hostile towards Dragon, Dream Chaser and CST-100.

[Evildead666]

No, they don't and there are a ton of NASA managers, congressmen etc. who still think shuttle should not be cancelled and are openly hostile towards Dragon, Dream Chaser and CST-100.

These people should be 'retired'.

[Dr Mordrid]

Besides design problems this program suffers from poor large program management, not unusual at NASA these days.

Not reported in most of the press is that this is a "hurricane tank," meaning that it was finished years ago in NASA's Louisiana facility then stored in a building that was later damaged by (drumroll) Katrina. Part of the buildings roof failed and fell on the tank, damaging both the foam and breaking a structural stringer. Repairs were made, it was stored a few more years, then used on this mission.

I'll leave it to you guys to comment on the wisdom involved in these decisions. Mine are unpublishable.

SpaceFlightNow reports the remaining concerns focus on image 600_2-001.

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, FL--The Endeavour astronauts will use an instrumented boom on the end of the shuttle's robot arm early Saturday to make a close-up, "focused" inspection of a gouge in a heat shield tile on the belly of the orbiter that was spotted during final approach to the space station, NASA managers said Friday.

LeRoy Cain, chairman of NASA's Mission Management Team, said shuttle pilot Gregory Johnson would oversee computer-assisted maneuvers to put the arm under the shuttle's right side to take high-resolution photos and laser scans of the damage site.

The data will be downlinked to NASA's Damage Assessment Team, or DAT, to determine if Endeavour can safely re-enter Earth's atmosphere as is or whether more analysis or repairs might be needed. Engineers suspect the former, but the inspection was ordered to make sure.
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During Endeavour's final approach to the space station Wednesday, the crew of the station photographed the heat shield tiles on the shuttle's belly during a now-routine back-flip maneuver directly below the lab complex. Image analysts spotted seven "areas of interest" that required additional analysis. All of those were cleared for re-entry as is with one exception: a relatively deep gouge in a tile between Endeavour's right-side main landing gear door and a smaller door that covers a liquid-oxygen feed line port.

"Ultimately, we determined that we're going to go do a focused inspection to get some more data on this particular site," Cain said.