Endeavour had been scheduled to lift off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 7:17 a.m. on Saturday for a mission to the International Space Station.
The leak was detected near an "umbilical plate" on the side of the shuttle's giant external tank as engineers were filling the tank with super cold liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. The tank was past the half way point when NASA managers scrubbed the launch at 12:30 a.m.
Launch director Mike Leinbach said hydrogen is very volatile and can burn, even in small concentrations.
"We are very, very sensitive to hydrogen on the ground," he said. "[We want] to make sure it is sealed properly at liftoff so we are not venting overboard and possibly run into a situation where we did not have enough hydrogen in the tank going uphill [entering orbit]."
NASA's launch team immediately began draining Endeavour's external fuel tank to begin an investigation on the leak. It is unsure when the mission will be rescheduled or how long it will take technicians to detect and fix the problem causing the leak.
The mysterious leak returns
A similar leak had thwarted the space shuttle Discovery's STS-119 launch, three months ago in March. The leak occurred where a vent line hooks up to the tank. Though the hookup was replaced and seepage plugged, the engineers were unable to fathom the exact source of the trouble.
"The situation was almost identical to what we had two flows ago," Mike Leinbach said. "It was discovered at almost identically the same time. It was eerily the same."
NASA has indicated that repairs could delay the shuttle's launch until next month. Trying to launch in the coming week would conflict with Wednesday's launch of an Atlas V rocket and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter from Cape Canaveral Air force station NASA said. Managers for the two missions will have to meet to discuss which flight should go first.
"We haven't even begun to work that out," said Mike Moses, mission management team chair, today at a briefing here. "We'll start those negotiations tomorrow and see where we get."
The mission of Endeavour
The crew of Endeavour is slated to go on a 16-day mission to deliver the final segment of Japan's huge space station lab known as Kibo – to create an external platform on which scientific experiments can be conducted in the vacuum of space.
If and when the astronauts dock, there will be 13 people together in orbit for the first time.
Post new comment