NASA Working On Technical Difficulties

Tuesday turned out to be a hectic day for NASA just as it had been anticipated. It was busy seeking solutions to its technical problems both in space as well as on the ground with astronauts inspecting rotary joints abroad the International Space Station and engineers examining the fuel tank sensors on the Atlantis.

The starboard rotary joint abroad the Space Station is supposed to automatically rotate 360 degrees to keep the solar panels on the correct side of the station, facing the sun, for power.

This starboard joint has been used only sparingly since October when it was locked in place and exhibited current spikes and vibrations .It was earlier expected that a space rock or meteorite might have caused the malfunctioning.

However, perfunctory inspections had revealed metal shavings in the race ring indicating a destructive grinding process in the mechanism. These finding were corroborated by the space walks conducted on Tuesday.

Space station commander Peggy Whitson and flight engineer Daniel Tani finished a 7 hour space walk in which they removed all 22 insulation covers and examined the insides of the starboard joint using a dentist style mirror on a rod.

This was a landmark space walk as it was the 100th since the assembly of the space station. Station commander Peggy Whitson also broke fellow NASA astronaut Sunita Williams record for most space walking time by a woman.

The Atlantis meanwhile has been grounded at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The launch of the shuttle has been delayed twice this month following malfunctioning fuel gauge sensors.

Three of the four fuel gauge sensors had been intermittently sending faulty data before. To evaluate the problem, NASA had to re-create the failures by loading the external fuel tanks with 500,000 pounds of super-cold liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen for performing test-runs.

To add to the woes, one of the four sensors (sensor no. 2), which had been working, fine before, also started malfunctioning after the test run.

The external tank will be kept full for several hours as engineers run tests to gather data from the fuel sensors on electronic monitors. 500,000 gallons of the cryogenic fuel will later be emptied.

NASA had to cancel launch attempts of the space shuttle earlier on December 6 and 9. It plans to launch the Atlantis as soon as possible to take the European science laboratory, Columbus, to the space station.

Shuttle program manager Wayne Hale said to the press “We know exactly what we’ve got to work on now. We're going to follow this trail where it leads us and we're going to solve this problem, and then we'll go fly, whether it's Jan. 10 or Feb. 10 or March 10.”

NASA will do well in solving these problems efficiently and as quickly as possible with the task of carrying the European science laboratory and preparing the space station for the Japanese laboratory in February pressing on its shoulders.