HOUSTON, Sept 10: Astronauts used a sensor-laden robot arm on Sunday to check for heat shield damage to shuttle Atlantis and Nasa said all looked well so far. The crew, on a flight to restart construction of the International Space Station, guided the arm up and down the spacecraft’s surface in a painstaking inspection that is now a routine part of shuttle flights after the Columbia disaster in 2003.
Nasa executives said pieces of ice and foam from Atlantis’ fuel tank glanced off the spacecraft several minutes after take-off from Florida on Saturday, but lead shuttle flight director Paul Dye said television pictures from the scan had shown no obvious damage.
“The data needs to be interpreted, but what we’ve seen looks good so far,” he said in a briefing at Johnson Space Centre in Houston.
“This has been an unusual shift (at Mission Control) because I have not seen a single problem with the vehicle,” Dye said.
Nasa engineers still must closely examine the images gathered by an array of lasers and cameras on the robot arm before Atlantis receives a clean bill of health.
Surface damage is critical because shuttle Columbia disintegrated as it returned to Florida on February 1, 2003 after a 1.67-pound (756-gram) piece of fuel tank insulating foam penetrated the heat shield on its wing during launch.
The seven Columbia astronauts were killed and the shuttle programme, including space station construction, was put on hold.
Nasa has spent more than $1 billion on safety upgrades to fix the flyaway foam problem and, after two flights to test the changes, believes the spacecraft can fly safely, with minimal foam loss expected during the rock and roll of launch.
The fuel tank is jettisoned from the shuttle a few minutes after launch and falls back into the ocean.
The debris seen during Saturday’s launch broke away more than four minutes after Atlantis lifted off, or at a time when it could strike the shuttle with little force.—Reuters
