NASA extends mission for Atlantis damage repair in space

Due to a 10cm tear on Atlantis’s thermal blanket and pieces of foam which fell off during the shuttle’s launch on Friday, NASA managers have extended Atlantis’ mission by two days for the necessary repairs.

Atlantis, whose departure in March was cancelled due to the damage caused on account of a hail storm, finally took off from Kennedy Space Centre on Friday. A 4x6 inch corner of a heat shielding blanket was damaged during its takeoff due to aerodynamic forces.

Engineers at Johnson Space Center suggested repairing of the blanket since they protect the shuttle from searing heat during re-entry into Earth's atmosphere and could cause heating damage during re-entry. The damage which was previously thought harmless, would be repaired during the shuttle's stay.

"It was a 100 percent consensus that the unknowns of the engineering analysis and the potential damage ... under the blanket was unacceptable and we should go in and fix it if we could," said John Shannon, chairman of the mission management team. “We think we're going to have some damage ... if you don't go off and fix this", Shannon had told the managers.

According to the engineers, the damage was caused by aerodynamic forces (wind forces) during launch and not by the piece of debris.

To repair the damages, an astronaut will attach himself to the end of the shuttle's robotic arm and reach the blanket near the shuttle’s tail. But the issue whether the damage will be repaired during a previously planned third spacewalk or an extra fourth one is still debated.

Atlantis was intended to deliver trusses including a pair of solar panels (a 17.5-ton truss that it brought up in its payload bay) in order to increase the supply of electric power on the International Space Station and bring back an old one, started unfolding a pair of solar arrays on Tuesday which two astronauts helped install on the international space station during a complex spacewalk of more than six hours on Monday which was delayed by about an hour because of overloading of the four spinning gyroscopes that keep the station’s attitude stable on orbit.

STS Mission Specialists John “Danny” Olivas and Jim Reilly removed locks on the new truss segment and connected the power lines to a new structural truss and solar arrays on the starboard side of the International Space Station after the shuttle pilot, Col. Lee Joseph Archambault of the Air Force, connected the truss to the station using the station’s robot arm.

Another solar array will be folded back up in a box on Wednesday so that it can be moved during a later shuttle mission. The overturning of that array will allow the new pair of arrays to rotate in the direction of the sun. If the arrays don’t fold up normally astronauts shall help it get retracted in their second spacewalk.

Space Shuttle Orbiter Atlantis is one of the fleet of space shuttles belonging to the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). It was the fourth operational shuttle built. Scheduled to be launched in March i.e. 3 months before into orbit for its next Space Shuttle mission STS-117, it got delayed due to damage of the spacecraft's external fuel tank from a hailstorm on February 26, 2007 which took two months for repair.

After spending six long months in the orbiting space station, Sunita Williams is all set to return home on board space shuttle Atlantis. Her place as space station crew is being taken by NASA astronaut Clayton Anderson. Williams is all set to break the record of Shannon Lucid for longest space flight by a woman with 188 days and 4 hours, three days before her scheduled return to earth on 19th June.