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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.
This kind of damage MUST have been occurring throughout the history of the program. And, if it has been NASA would have been aware during the regular retiling of the Shuttle. My question is why wasn't the ice impact problem wasn't addressed long ago.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
"it's just a flesh wound"
Prosperity is only an instrument to be used, not a deity to be worshipped. Calvin Coolidge
On NPR this morning, I heard that NASA was actually debating whether or not to even address this, as they did not want to go to all the trouble and spoil the shuttle's schedule.
This sounded especially insane to me...if NASA loses another shuttle because of this same tile-damage problem, and because they couldn't be bothered to take the time to fix the problem when they could have, it will be the end of NASA.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Perhaps I'm missing something (and I'm sure I am), but perhaps this is something of a blessing?
Leave Endeavour in orbit. Compared to the big-mother boosters, the shuttle itself does not require a lot of fuel, and given the smaller size of the next-generation craft we're looking at, I could see a use for a "space truck" the size of Endeavour, even after the shuttle program does out the door.
Just send up something else to bring them home.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Nay, 'tis not to be. Like Lance before him, he too shall continue to plague the Earth's surface.
Please donate your spare CPU cycles to help fight cancer and other diseases
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
I bet those are pictures of Roland's bathroom floor.
--
Capitalism: When it uses the carrot, it's called democracy. When it uses the stick, its called facism.
Capitalism: When it uses the carrot, it's called democracy. When it uses the stick, it's called fascism.
Image 1
Thermal Image
Image 2
Image 3
Image extracted from a video made by Neptec LCS
You can't handle the truth.
I like the fact that our society is open enough that this information and this debate is public. There are many governments in this world today who would not allow this information to be released and would make the decision based on cloaked objectives and goals. The USA has its problems (e.g. the stupidity of Iraq) but it sets us apart that this is happening in the open. Nobody is going to get arrested for debating or questioning this intense and sensitive topic.
the rocket scientist weren't allowed to do there jobs before smart ass.
Without a scale to compare to, the gouge looks HUGE and devastating.
I've heard on the radio that they are discussing a roughly 3" scrape....which, if scaled to the longest axis, is objectively pretty small, but when considered against the turbulence, heat, and pressure that those belly tiles are faced with? It looks huge and devastating again.
Those astronauts have balls of steel if they ride that thing down again.
-Styopa
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.
If they're typical tiles and they haven't drastically changed things from the demo they have down in Florida that I looked at 10 years ago, they're 3 or 4 inches on a side. The NPR story this morning said the gouge was 3" long.
It looks borderline to me. I think they've successfully landed with much bigger gouges or missing tiles in the past, but it probably depends on WHERE the gouge is. If it's in a flat part of the belly, it's probably not a problem. If it's near a leading edge, more of a problem.
More information on the size and use of the anti-heat tiles or High-temperature reusable surface insulation (HRSI) can be found in this article on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_shuttle_thermal _protection_system
It seems they are not that big, and I do not think one or 2 damaged tiles whould have a massive effect on the safety of the shuttle. However if someone leaked that tiles were damaged (no matter how few tiles) and NASA did not act on it, the public would be outraged. So perhaps NASA thinks its best to mention this in public and fix it, even if it doesnt have to be fixed at all. Or what if the chance is 1 in a million that it has any effect, NASA doesnt act and the thing crashed, people would be outraged as well. Better safe than sorry.
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
We'z gonna fix yo bucket! What we haz right here is a crack in da tile instead of crack in da vile.
Word! Pass dat pipe, homie.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Leave the launching to the Europeans, they're the only ones who seem to be able to get it right.
...
Whens the last time the Europeans have launched humans into space? *crickets*
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.
Blimey, he's done well for himself. All those /. links to his blog did some good.
... he'd be standing on top of a table right now screaming about something, NASA shuttle in space or not. He was a pretty intense kind of guy who could get away with standing on tables, soap boxes, and other tall things.
True. He was a passionate guy who cared about things like that. He also had startling insight and an annoying habit of being right most of the time.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
It's sad that we have to do this on EVERY launch when we had developed a perfectly good system where the heat shield was covered for the entire time it wasn't in use.
What, precisely, was wrong with the capsule system that necessitated the development of something that can *gasp* glide to a landing? How have we saved money by building a reusable craft when it costs a billion dollars a launch?
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
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
Don't try to explain physics to these dorks, they won't get it. Most of them consider /. the intellectual part of their day, right between belittling users and arguing if Batman could REALLY beat up Superman.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
OK, what's the original quote, and was it Shepard or Glenn? Or was this just too good a line for any of the Right Stuff mob to pass up?
"When reporters asked Shepard what he thought about as he sat atop the Redstone rocket, waiting for liftoff, he had replied, 'The fact that every part of this ship was built by the low bidder.'"
"I felt about as good as anybody would, sitting in a capsule on top of a rocket that were both built by the lowest bidder." (Senator John Glenn, Colonel USMC, Retired)
"It's a very sobering feeling to be up in space and realize that one's safety factor was determined by the lowest bidder on a government contract." -- Alan Shepard.
That'll buff right out.....
The vast majority of the Russian population is west of the Urals, making them Europeans by definition. Most of those European Russians are Slavic, which is by definition also European. So, you're right, a European purchased a ticket on a European-built spacecraft, launched in Central Asia by the Europeans who were the first to put a man in orbit, were the first to launch a space station and still hold the record for longest orbital habitation, which of course proves that only Americans can succeed at spaceflight.
Lets solve this the old fashioned way with a snowball fight. Everyone on the 'foam is the cause' over to the left tile castle, and start throwing the foam balls. Everyone on the 'ice is the cause' over to the right tile castle, and start throwing the snow balls.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
I don't specialize in fluid or thermodynamics but this is my opinion, and any support/rebuttal is welcome!
h tm shows the area around the hole endures about 10 minutes of 1500 deg F heat, and Google tells me aluminum melts at 1220 deg F. On the surface (pun intended), this would seem cause for concern.
A quick check on re-entry temperature variation on this site: http://www.columbiassacrifice.com/$D_temperature.
If NASA engineers feel these tiles can re-enter without repair, their reasons could be:
1) This area of the shuttle does not have to contend with the extreme heat that is experienced at the nose or other leading edge surfaces so the "hot air" isn't hot enough to melt the aluminum in the belly, and
2) The hole must be small enough that hot air flow may "skip" over it on re-entry. If the hot air can indeed passes right over it, then the danger to the aluminum inside is probably not very great.
If the engineers ran a "simplified" mathematical simulation assuming the hole was just the "average" well-formed hole, the above rationale would make sense.
I think the more important concern to focus on (which I'm sure NASA must have considered), is that this hole is very asymmetric. The photos provide terrific evidence. One side the gash slopes gently into the "hole" (I presume where the depth sensor reads 1.2 inches, since the tiles are only 1 inch thick), and on the other side, you have a quarter ping-pong ball cut-out as well as a 90-degree lip of half-tile above the hole. In this instance, I think the direction of travel of these tiles on re-entry matters a great deal... I think the first scenario below may be most cause for concern.
1) If the "up" orientation of the tile lettering is the shuttle's forward direction, I would imagine the hot air flow will not be turbulent upon entering the gash, and will actually follow the gentle slope downwards towards and into the hole, melting what is inside. What hot air doesn't make it into the hole will smack into the 90-degree lip and the quarter ping-pong ball cut-out, causing excess heat at those edges and/or loosening that tile from its backing, causing it to fall off (though not too likely since that lip represents only a small portion of that tile, and it is buttressed by the other tiles "behind" it).
2) On the other hand, if the forward direction was reversed, the hot air flow would become turbulent upon meeting the quarter ping-pong ball cut-out. If the dimensions of that cut-out are sufficiently disruptive, the turbulent hot air could "lick" the hole, melting whatever is inside, what doesn't go into the hole will glide off the sloped ceramic gouge on the other side. With the turbulent air, there will be a negative air pressure around that tile, but the force shouldn't be enough to rip the tile from its backing.
If the shuttle direction is that of option #1, let's hope that hole is small enough that as litte hot air gets in as possible.
My point is this: A hole is not just a hole unless it looks the same from all sides...
Nowadays they spend more money and time examining their own machinery than examining the space.
While I'm sure the holes in the tiles of the shuttle is not part of NASA's plan I think it's actually a very useful part of the mission.
We need to get beyond this whole concept of sending up the best and the brightest and throwing gobs of money at the program. We need to get to the point where we will have establishments (most likely lunar at first) where we're going to have real workers and not just high end engineers.
The idea of doing maintenance in space is going to be part of this future colonization. Being able to know how to do real work in this environment is going to bring us much closer to those goals. If we're yanking people out of a space station or colony every time the slightest maintenance needs done we're going to be paying big bucks with little return.
The lessons learned with the tiles on the shuttle and the heavy maintenance schedule of the Mir are going to take us a long way in establishing real working environments instead of just clean room type experiments.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.