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Minor Damage Found On Space Shuttle
The BBC is reporting on minor damage to the space shuttle Atlantis revealed by a 10-hour inspection in orbit. On the shuttle's right side, near where the wing joins the body, inspection revealed a 21" (53cm) line of chips in the tiles that make up the vehicle's heat shield. "...more analysis by engineers would determine whether a 'focused inspection' was needed in that specific area. If so, astronauts would use sensors to determine the exact depth of the damage to the heat shield tiles. NASA has placed the space shuttle Endeavour on stand-by to rescue the crew of Atlantis if they are endangered." The crew couldn't shelter on the ISS in case of trouble, because their orbit is higher and on a different inclination.
.. if they launch Endeavour to rescue Atlantis, and Endeavour suffers damage at launch?
Can someone speculate the feasibility of "dropping" to meet ISS?
I mean, does NASA have equipments/knowledge/training to do such maneuver?
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
Roger that.
FWIW, you can get a lot of mission info while it happens, even if you don't have satellite TV - http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
More info here: http://spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts125/090512fd2/index5.html
"And Scooter, also I've got some good news about the tile damage that we saw on the starboard chine area earlier today," astronaut Alan Poindexter radioed from mission control shortly after 8 p.m.
"Oh, I'm looking forward to that. Go ahead," replied shuttle commander Scott "Scooter" Altman.
"It turns out that a focussed inspection of that area on the starboard chine is not going to be required," Poindexter reported.
"All right, you've got some happy EVA campers on that," Altman said.
wot no sig
So in case of any real damage, Endeavor blasts off (piloted by a 2 Astronaut crew?), all the Astronauts on board Atlantis pack their bags and take a seat in the other shutlle and live happily ever after, which is most important of all. But what would happen to Atlantis in that case? You obviously can't tow it or land it by remote, but leaving such a large object in a (decaying) orbit could cause a lot of trouble. So what would they do? Send it to the moon à la "Space Cowboys" or give it a gentle but controlled kick, letting it crash and burn up in the atmosphere?
It's been on the front page of CNN.com since the afternoon. Here's the story.
Searching "shuttle" on msnbc.com and foxnews.com shows that both of them are carrying the story too, though neither site has it "above the fold" right now.
Is this really a new development that the Shuttle gets increasingly fragile or is it just the fact that since Columbia it gets checked extra carefully and therefore revealing what before just went unnoticed?
Maybe NASA could build a capsule small enough to put into the shuttle through the side hatch. One crew member initiates re-entry then rides out aero braking inside the capsule. If the spacecraft burns up the capsule falls into the air. Parachutes open automatically.
As far as I know the pilot is only needed to manually deploy landing gear. Everything else can be automatic or remotely operated.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Haven't seen any stories on the U.S. news websites.
Then why all the bitching that /. is too US-centric? Or is "News for nerds" not a news website?
By the way, opening yahoo news it was right on top:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090513/ts_alt_afp/usspaceastronomyhubble;_ylt=Aj3NU3nOc4iB6txwGUCXG3wPLBIF
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
"Have Rockets Run Their Course?"
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
I think the best solution would be if Atlantis could be brought back by autopilot. If the damage is marginal (that is they THINK it might destroy the shuttle but are not sure) then bringing it back unmanned would give you the possibility (if the damage is survivable) of recouping your billion dollar plus investment.
Won't work. The landing spots are generally near the takeoff spots. The takeoff spots were located so if it blows up on takeoff, the parts rain down on the dolphins and whales. Unfortunately (?) when it comes in to land, it arrives from the opposite direction, and no one selected landing sites that are empty to the west. Unfortunately gets a ? mark because back in the 70s when the shuttle was going to do everything for everyone, everywhere, it was occasionally claimed it would be able to land on commercial runways... so if you're coming in a bit short, just land at colorado international airport. That, along with most of the vehicles abilities, was all cut during development to save money.
The astronauts may have lobbied to keep NASA from giving the shuttles the ability to land themselves (or via ground control) in an attempt to keep pilots from being made irrelevant. (Throwback to test-pilot days I guess).
Based on the faulty assumption that all pilots do is keep it straight and level and wait as patiently as the plane lands. The whole point of decades of training for airline pilots and astronauts is for them to fully understand each little bit of the A/C and how to work when it breaks. They know their vehicle like a kernel hacker knows his kernel.
So, say the exhaust temperature of one APU is fluctuating. If the computer could "do something" to fix it, it would. The humans job is to invent new ideas of troubleshooting and fixing. Flip that switch see what happens, try this maneuver. The stuff the Apollo 13 guys did is not amazing or unlikely or lucky, despite what the general public thinks, it is in fact exactly what they were supposed to do...
Think of that Canadian pilot whom invented a way to put a jetliner in a slip to lose altitude to land at an abandoned military field when the plane ran out of gas because of metric/imperial issues.
Thats why you have humans onsite, in the loop.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
This is going to hurt its blue book value though.
--
Feeling slow today?
Think of that Canadian pilot whom invented a way to put a jetliner in a slip to lose altitude to land at an abandoned military field when the plane ran out of gas because of metric/imperial issues.
I take that as an reference to Gimli Glider, a story that anybody interested about aviation should read. Another good example of having a human in the loop was 2003 shootdown in Baghdad.
-- Reality checks don't bounce.
http://spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts125/090508sts400/
"When we made the decision, the odds were 1-in-473 that we would have a problem on the shuttle for which a rescue shuttle was the solution," Griffin said. "Now, there are a lot of problems you can have on the shuttle, right? There are a lot of ways you can die on the shuttle, which is what gives you the overall shuttle PRA (probabilistic risk assessment) of about 1-in-75 or so. So you're roughly five-and-a-half, six times likelier to die on the shuttle for some reason that the backup shuttle can't save you from than you are to die from one the backup shuttle can save you from. ... From a statistical point of view, it makes no real sense to have a backup shuttle.
"However, here's the flip side. ... Those numbers cannot be explained to politicians or the general public. And should we have a failure with those 1-in-473 or whatever odds it was, should we have a failure that the rescue shuttle could have saved you from and we had not done it, the consequence to NASA would have been incalculable. We would appear to have been cavalier with human life, we would appear to have not taken every possible precaution, we would appear to have been coldly calculating the odds and rolling the dice with people's lives. And the appearance of behaving that way, in my judgment, was unacceptable. I could not risk that for NASA."
While the overall risk of impact damage is about three times higher for a Hubble mission than a flight to the International Space Station, it is not as bad as flight planners initially feared.
"We know we're accepting a little higher risk for this flight," Steve Stich, manager of the orbiter project office at the Johnson Space Center, said in an interview. "That's why we've tracked it very carefully."
Even factoring in debris from a satellite collision in February between a defunct Russian Cosmos satellite and an Iridium telephone relay station, the mean odds of a catastrophic impact during the Hubble mission are on the order of 1-in-229, which is well below the 1-in-200 threshold that requires an executive-level decision by NASA's leadership.
A preliminary analysis put the odds at 1-in-185, but the numbers improved after recent radar observations and consideration of the shuttle's orientation in space during the Hubble mission. The planned orientation, or attitude timeline, reduces the crew's exposure to impacts that could damage critical areas of the ship's heat shield, the coolant loops in the shuttle's cargo bay door radiators and cockpit windows.
wot no sig
"I don't know that there's enough fuel on the shuttle to bring it down to a geosynchronous orbit. They have oms thrusters, good for changing altitude on a mission and maintaining their orbit, but not dropping so much speed."
WTF?????
Geosynchronous orbit is about 36000 kilometers, while Shuttle's orbit is about 300 kilomterers, AFAIR.
In any case, going UP won't help you a bit (you'll still be in an inertial orbit). You need to _reduce_ your speed essentially to zero.
That means you have to expend _the_ _same_ _amount_ of fuel that was required to lift the Shuttle in the first place.
And that's completely impossible with chemical fuels.