107 Cameras to Scan Discovery for Damage

neutron_p writes "We already know that NASA has prepared for space shuttle rescue mission if a crisis arises during Discovery's return to flight. NASA wants to avoid any risk, that's why they also installed 107 cameras which will film and photograph the orbiter's first two minutes of ascent from every angle scanning for pieces of insulation foam or ice fall off during the launch and strike the shuttle, the kind of damage that doomed its predecessor Columbia. Cameras will be installed around the launch pad and at distances of 6 to 60 kilometers (some 3.5 to 35 miles) away, as well as on board of two airplanes and on the shuttle itself."

Comments

American miles?

[busman]

I don't know where the article got their conversions from but I sure hope it wasn't from NASA!

6km is approx 3.7 miles not 3.5 and
60km is 37 miles and not 35

Re:Why?

[jaxdahl]

Then they could ditch aboard the ISS (which is where they're going) then take a Soyuz capsule back to earth.

They should ask the Russians

[bogaboga]

How do the Russians launch their vehicles one after another without lots of funfare but with almost success? There have been almost 2,300 successful Soyuz launches and just 11 Soyuz failures ever...! That's a success rate that cant be beat! To make matters worse, they do it cheaper too!

Re:They should ask the Russians

[DerekLyons]

Nobody needs to ask the Russians - to students of space issues the answers are well known.

How do the Russians launch their vehicles one after another without lots of funfare but with almost success?

By having an extremely simple booster with low-to-modest performance and vast amounts of margin built in. This means pretty reliable, but it means not much room for growth and not much in the way of accomplishments. (What accomplishments they do have are because of the larger, and much less reliable and more expensive Proton - not the Soyuz.)

There have been almost 2,300 successful Soyuz launches and just 11 Soyuz failures ever...!

You have to be careful there - the Russian have two spacecraft that they call Soyuz, don't confuse the two.

The Soyuz booster has indeed flown 2000-odd time, with a sucess rate of 98%. Oddly enough, thats the same sucess rate that the US has achieved.

The Soyuz capsule on the other hand, has flown only 90-odd times, and has had significant (life threatening) accidents no fewer then 8 times, plus two fatal accidents, plus about 8 loss-of-mission accidents.

That's a success rate that cant be beat!

That's a sucess rate no better than the US, and from some angles far worse. It's a sucess rate that in any other industry would cause headlines in 72-point type on a daily basis. (If 1% of 747 flights failed, there's be something like 20-30 747 crashes daily.)

To make matters worse, they do it cheaper too!

Umm... Maybe. Nobody knows how much a Soyuz (booster or capsule) flight actually costs. There's no direct conversion - and the prices they've quoted/charged have varied widely. No doubt not having to amortize the cost of your infrastructure helps, as does paying your engineers wages equivalent to your average third-world Nike sweat shop worker.

Safety....

[UMhydrogen]

Um, I think you people have completely missed the whole point of the safety precautions in this new space shuttle launch. When the shuttle launches they have their backup shuttle waiting should something go wrong. If something goes wrong, Discovery like, where the shuttle makes it to the ISS but can't return to earth, they still have the backup shuttle to launch and bring them home.

The point of the cameras is to determine if something broke on the shuttle. If something breaks the shuttle will not return to Earth. The cameras aren't there to say "OMG, SOMETHING WENT WRONG, ABORT." The cameras are there to determine if something went wrong and if so, to send the backup shuttle into space to return the astornauts safely to earth.

Re:That's great, but...

[decipher_saint]

Let's say the cameras spot something fishy, like another strike to the tiles during liftoff.

What next?

NASA reviews the tapes and assesses whether or not the point of failure is avoidable or is an inherant flaw of the shuttle system.

Re:Why?

[Andy Gardner]

Funny you should say that because they probably would abort, albeit not 100' off the pad. There are two ascent (pre orbital) abort modes.

The first, RTLS (Return To Launch Site Abort Mode) can be initiated upto T+4mintues20 and involves an early ET (External Tank) seperation followed by a powered phase to bleed of excess fuel and a glide phase which see's the orbiter return to KSC at approximately T+25minutes.

The second is the TAL (Transatlantic Abort Landing). This can be initiated in the event of critical failure after T+4minutes20. The orbiter continues in a balistic trajectory downrange across the Atlantic to land at a runway in Spain, Gambia or Morocco. Landing occurs T+45minutes.

2 contingency plans...

[jpellino]

1. They will be spacewalking to test exterior repair, if it works, they can fix it on orbit.

2. They're going to be visiting the station - this mission is reportedly rigged so that if something really bad is found, the can stay on station until another shuttle can be launched.