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Gouge Found on Shuttle Endeavour's Underside
SonicSpike writes " NASA has discovered a chunk missing from the underside of the space shuttle Endeavour. It was discovered after the shuttle docked with the ISS earlier today. Technicians theorize it may have been caused by ice ripping free of a fuel take during takeoff. From the article:'The gouge — about 3 inches square — was spotted in zoom-in photography taken by the space station crew shortly before Endeavour delivered teacher-astronaut Barbara Morgan and her six crewmates to the orbiting outpost ... On Sunday, the astronauts will inspect the area, using Endeavour's 100-foot robot arm and extension beam. Lasers on the end of the beam will gauge the exact size and depth of the gouge, Shannon said, and then engineering analyses will determine whether the damage is severe enough to warrant repairs. Radar images show a white spray or streak coming off Endeavour 58 seconds after liftoff. Engineers theorize that if the debris was ice, it pierced the tile and then broke up, scraping the area downwind. Pictures from Friday's photo inspection show downwind scrapes."
Lots (yes it's a pdf so kill me). See page 9.
Sorta reminds me of the time the de Havilland Comet blew up in mid air and aviation engineers learned about fatigue and decided to go look at other airplanes for signs of fatigue cracks and found them everywhere. Talk about freaking out.
Then, after that, several smart people[1] figured out that cracks always had been everywhere and, you know, chill. The airplanes we fly around on have lots of cracks. The thing that saves our collective butts is that they are understood.
1 P Paris and F Erdogan (1963), A critical analysis of crack propagation laws, Journal of Basic Engineering, Transactions of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, December 1963, pp.528-534.Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
The Discovery was given remote landing capability in 2006. I would be shocked if the Endeavour didn't have this same capability.
3 0/0458246&from=rss
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/
If mission control thinks a manned landing too risky, they'll just hook up the remote system and send down the can without the spam. Another Shuttle will be sent up in 6 or 8 weeks and take the whole lot of them home.
This would probably be another large setback to the ISS and to the astronaut corps. The "rescue mission" would probably depart with just 2 or 3 astronauts. And if the Endeavour was lost on re-entry, it would probably doom the shuttle program.
Sucks to be an astronaut these days. Chances of dying, 1 in 59, and you're lucky to get a single ride every 10 years.
On the other hand, SpaceX may get be getting some rush orders for Falcon 9's and Dragons.
I've read that a little piece of paint made a fairly noticeable "dent" in the Shuttle's windshield. Here's a website that mentions it: http://www.spacetoday.org/Satellites/SatBytes/Spac eJunk.html
Several other sites showed up on Google when I searched for shuttle, fleck of paint, windshield
Considering how small the mass of the paint must have been, I could easily see how a small pebble sized object could cause major damage, but I'm not a rocket scientist. I think there has also been some general concern about all of the debris from China's ASAT test earlier this year. I think they are tracking most of the thousands of pieces of debris, so they would hopefully have an idea if something was coming, but I'm sure that they can't track the smallest pieces of debris. There are some animations on the web that show how the debris spread out from that test - its really amazing.
When you're traveling at 7 km per second, hitting anything that is not traveling along with you on a similar orbit (they would have similar velocities and wouldn't be moving as fast relative to you) has got to be seriously bad news.
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