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| Nasa to carry out shuttle repairs |
| The Atlantis space shuttle mission will be extended from 11 to 13 days so that astronauts can attempt to fix a thermal blanket that peeled back during
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| UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
, 12-June-2007
10:12:32 AM |
| The repairs could be made during a planned third spacewalk or a fourth, extra one, Nasa managers have said.
Engineers think the blanket was loosened by aerodynamic forces during lift-off, and was not hit by debris.
Atlantis docked with the ISS on Sunday, after a back flip so that its underside could be inspected for damage.
Damage to the shuttle Columbia in 2003 during its launch led to the vehicle's disintegration as it returned to Earth, killing all seven crew.
Delay fears
A 10cm (4in) section of thermal blanket - which protects the shuttle from the intense heat of re-entering the atmosphere - peeled back as the shuttle blasted off from Cape Canaveral on Friday.
"It was a 100% consensus that the unknowns of the engineering analysis and the potential damage... under the blanket was unacceptable and we should go in and fix it if we could," said John Shannon, who chairs the mission
management team.
Engineers do not think the re-entry heat could burn through the graphite structure underneath the blanket and jeopardise lives, but they are concerned it might cause some damage that would require repairs on the ground.
With three additional shuttle flights to the ISS planned this year, Nasa cannot afford any delays.
During the repair, an astronaut will probably reach the blanket, located near Atlantis' rear, by securing themselves to the end of the shuttle's robotic arm and boom.
On Monday, two US astronauts aboard Atlantis carried out a spacewalk to begin deploying new solar panels on the International Space Station (ISS).
The operation was delayed for several hours when four gyroscopes that keep the ISS steady became overloaded.
Power capacity
The space station's robotic arm had already attached a new 16-tonne (35,000lb) segment to the ISS containing a pair of new solar panels.
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