Discovery 'in good condition'
2005-08-11 07:11
Los Angeles - Space shuttle Discovery is in exceptionally good condition following its troubled 14-day orbital voyage, experts preparing the craft for its piggy-back journey home said on Wednesday.
The craft's mission, the first shuttle outing since the Columbia disintegrated in 2003, was dogged by concerns over its safety after insulation foam from its fuel fell off the craft on take-off.
"It's the cleanest I've ever seen," said Dean Schaaf, Nasa's post-landing recovery convoy commander who has overseen the post-flight operations following 10 earlier shuttle missions.
The thermal protection system tiles on the underside of the Discovery, its reinforced carbon-carbon nose cap and the leading edges of its wings suffered less damage on take-off and re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere than other shuttles had incurred, Nasa said.
Discovery landed safely at California's Edwards Air Force Base early on Tuesday after a nail-biting and much-delayed journey back to Earth following two and a half years of improvements to the shuttle following the Columbia disaster.
Columbia burned up and disintegrated on re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere on February 1, 2003 after its heat shield tiles were damaged by a large piece of foam that fell off its fuel tank on take-off.
Nasa spent two and half years and many millions of dollars making safety improvements to Discovery, focusing notably on preventing insulation foam from falling off, an improvement that was clearly not entirely successful.
But despite fears that Discovery may also have suffered more serious damage in its foam incident, Schaaf said that a preliminary inspection indicated that those fears were overplayed.
Discovery suffered around 100 "dings", but only about 20 were an inch or larger in diameter, "reflecting Nasa's efforts to reduce the shedding of foam and ice from the Shuttle's external tank during ascent," the US space agency said.
Schaaf and his team are preparing Discovery for its 5 000-kilometre piggy-back journey back to its home base of Cape Canaveral in Florida, where bad weather thwarted its landing at the last minute on Tuesday.
Preparations to bolt the ship on the back of a Boeing 747 and ferry it back to the Kennedy Space Centre will take about six days and will begin in earnest on Thursday, Nasa said.