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Images of Endeavour's Damaged Tiles
Roland Piquepaille writes "Neptec Design Group, a Canadian company and a NASA prime contractor for 25 space missions, was kind enough to send me exclusive images of Endeavour's damaged tiles during its last take-off. So here are some of these pictures" The pictures are pretty amazing and make the urgency of this whole thing much more amazing.
I wouldn't call those too exclusive.... look at the "3D Video of Endeavour Tile Damage" video on this page: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/main/ind ex.html
Image 1
Thermal Image
Image 2
Image 3
Image extracted from a video made by Neptec LCS
You can't handle the truth.
You do realize that the Shuttle has landed many times before the Columbia disaster with whole tiles missing. This most likely is a non-issue although I'm glad NASA is treating it seriously. Besides, these tiles are on the belly of the orbiter. The damaged RCC panels on Columbia were on the leading edge of a wing where there are greater temperatures on reentry.
I don't think you realize the inherent danger in attempting to fix these either.
from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_extern al_tank):
Development of the ETs thermal protection system has been problematic, and has proven a fatal weakness to shuttle mission safety. NASA has had difficulty preventing fragments of foam from detaching during flight, ever since a 1995 decision to remove chlorofluorocarbon-11 (CFC-14) from the composition of the foam in compliance with an Environmental Protection Agency ban on CFCs under section 610 of the Clean Air Act. In its place, a hydrochlorofluorocarbon known as HCFC 141b was certified for use and phased into the shuttle program. The "new" foam containing HCFC 141b was first used on the aft dome portion of ET-82 during the flight of STS-79 in 1996. Use of HCFC 141b was expanded to the ETs acreage, or larger portions of the tank, starting with ET-88, which flew on STS-86 in 1997.
My posts are definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.
Turn in your geek card. It wasn't the 80's, and the shuttle wasn't coming back because it hadn't been to space. It was the Enterprise, it was the 70's, and it was during the development of the shuttle.
No weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men.-Ronald Reagan
Oh, and for another tidbit. Ice, since its denser, and heavier than the insulating foam, is a bigger problem than the foam is when it breaks off. It takes a smaller chunk of ice to break off and smack the orbiter to cause an equivalent amount of damager to a larger chunk of foam.
Foam does more damage than ice. Ice is dense and keeps its velocity high, which translates to a low velocity relative to the shuttle. Foam on the other hand is much less dense and slows down very quickly, translating to high velocities relative to the shuttle.
Remember, kinetic energy = 0.5 * mass * V^2. Velocity is what kills, not mass.
Those are some dinky little low resolution pics. Here's one of Endeavor with the Earth as backdrop, today's NASA "Image of the day". Yesterday's is spacewalking astronaut Rick Mastracchio fixing something outside the space station. Here it is taking off, and here's another liftoff pic. These are all of the present mission that's still up there inspecting tiles. Here is the "Image of the day" gallery. These are bigassed, high resolution pictures, most of them breathtaking.
-mcgrew
What's interesting is how delicate the tiles are. I saw a presentation by a NASA guy some time ago and I was allowed to hold the tiles. They're extremely light, almost feeling like their core is some kind of foam. The black ceramic layer on top is surprisingly thin.
I asked the presenter specifically about how delicate they felt. He then "flicked"/snapped the tile with his finger/fingernail, which put a sizeable dent into the tile, easily cracking the brittle black layer, and you could see the white foam underneath.
Therefore, it's no surprise to me to see this kind of damage. It probably wasn't even impacted with what could be considered excessive force.
Makes you wonder what kind of tile damage shuttles had -- all those successfully landed shuttle missions -- before such close scrutiny.
This point about how the foam insulation process was changed has come up many times in discussions about the damage to Endeavor. And it's wrong.
It has its origin in one of Rush Limbaugh's lies. As it turns out, the foam that dealt Columbia the death blow was the old-style CFC foam. The problem was in the hand-spraying application method used on that area, which left gaps and voids in the foam.
Yes, when they first started using the CFC-free foam in 1997 there were some problems seen. Changes were quickly made to improve the adhesion.
There were also plenty of problems with the CFC foam - "popcorning" from trapped air bubbled was noted in 1995, while in 1992 Columbia was struck by a large piece of foam, ripping a 12cm gouge in the tiles. Both of these were before the switch to CFC-free foam.
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You cannot wash away blood with blood
It isn't momentum, again, it is kinetic energy that causes damage, KE = 0.5 * m * V^2. The velocity, squared, overcomes the density difference in short order. Again, go do some research on Columbia. It is consensus that foam did the damage.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_TMA-10
The tile was then passed from student to student. As I said above, it was as hard as ceramic and as light as styrofoam. Even if an astronaut hit a tile deliberately with a sharp instrument, it is unlikely they could damage it.
I'm not sure what your teacher was showing you, but the Shuttle tiles are quite definitely fragile. See these articles:
Rich.
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