Shuttle Atlantis cleared for landing

[Guest Glenn]

Source: http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,20 ... 02,00.html

 

NASA managers cleared space shuttle Atlantis for a Friday morning (AEST) landing attempt in Florida, confident that unidentified objects spotted near the spaceship did not result from heat shield or other critical equipment damage.Atlantis's homecoming from an 11-day construction mission at the International Space Station had been planned for today, but was delayed so the crew could conduct a third inspection of their ship's heat shield.

 

The extra inspection was prompted by video showing a mysterious dark object flying near the shuttle yesterday.

 

A second item was spotted by one of Atlantis's astronauts and photographed.

 

"The vehicle is in good shape and we're going to march to de-orbit tomorrow," astronaut Terry Virts from Mission Control radioed to the crew.

 

NASA was concerned that the items might be debris from an impact that had damaged the shuttle's heat shield or other critical systems. Since the 2003 Columbia disaster, caused by debris flying during the launch that damaged the shuttle, NASA has been particularly sensitive to the safety of the spacecraft before they return to Earth.

 

The shuttle crew saw three more unidentified objects overnight.

 

"Nothing was found to be missing or damaged," shuttle program manager Wayne Hale told reporters after the inspections.

 

Atlantis astronauts used a camera on a 15-metre robot arm to scan the shuttle surface for damage and then were told to take a closer look with a longer, sensor-laden boom.

 

The Atlantis mission followed two test flights to refine post-Columbia safety upgrades and was the first of at least 15 flights to complete the half-finished International Space Station by 2010, when shuttles will be retired.

 

Atlantis was on its way back from the station, where its crew installed a $372 million solar power unit and truss structure, when the dark object was seen in television shots.

 

Shuttle program manager Hale said the object could be ice or a small piece of plastic that came loose when the Atlantis crew tested flight controls yesterday.

 

During overnight inspections, shuttle commander Brent Jett said one of the new bits of debris looked like a piece of "reflective cloth".

 

"It doesn't look like anything I've ever seen on the outside of the shuttle, that's for sure," he said.

 

NASA flight director Paul Dye said it was "not uncommon" to see debris floating around the shuttle.

 

Mr Stich said objects typically floated out of the ship's payload bay when the doors were opened at the beginning of a mission, but conceded it was a bit unusual to see such debris this late in a space trip.

 

The inspections came on a busy day in space as a Russian Soyuz spacecraft docked at the International Space Station carrying two new crew members, cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin and US astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, and space tourist Anousheh Ansari, an Iranian-born American businesswoman.

 

With the station's newly-installed 73-metre solar-power array in the background, Soyuz could be seen in television shots creeping toward the space outpost 352km above Earth before docking with a gentle bump.

 

Later, the Soyuz crew opened the hatch and were met with big hugs and smiles from current station inhabitants Pavel Vinogradov, Jeff Williams and Thomas Reiter.

 

"It was a smooth ride," said a smiling Ansari, a wealthy entrepreneur who is believed to have paid the Russian space agency $US20 million ($26.7 million) for her trip.