A Mars Odyssey

Next Thursday, February 7, 2007, will hopefully be a successful day for NASA as it launches its Atlantis Space Shuttle safely heading toward the International Space Station. Up until now, it has been nothing but a troubled nightmare, as one thing after another has stood in the way of this very important launching.

Remaining on schedule as of today, last Tuesday the Atlantis STS-122 engineers had noticed a bent cooling system hose that was bent the wrong way. It appears to be nothing major as of this moment, yet still needs repaired before launching. The hose is part of the shuttle’s cooling system, and the engineers were originally worried it may develop a leak once the shuttle was in space. This flexible hose carries the shuttle’s Freon through the entire cooling system of the Atlantis, but with it being kinked the wrong way this may be a problem.

Plans for the kinked hose are to presently leave it on board the Atlantis, with the engineers gently pushing the bent hose back into Atlantis’ payload bay compartment before launching, according to NASA spokesperson Allard Beutel. “In tests, it went really well,” Beutel told SPACE.com, adding that the fix is not expected to impact Atlantis’ planned Feb. 7 launch. “They’ve been practicing this since Wednesday.”

The repair for the kinked radiator hose will be performed this coming Sunday before the Atlantis space shuttle launching. Plans are for a NASA technician to climb inside a 60-foot payload bay onboard the space shuttle at the beginning stage of the launching, and then quickly squeeze out of the cargo hold before the shell-like doors close for launch. According to the NASA engineers, Atlantis will close its payload bay doors 12 hours sooner than originally planned, allowing extra cushion should the repair take too long. And if the repairs do not work once in space, the Atlantis has a backup cooling system, but the engineers see no problem with the misaligned hose, considering it undamaged and leak-free.

So far, the attention of the NASA engineers has pretty much been focusing on the space shuttle’s malfunctioning fuel tank level sensors, which has been going on since early December of 2007. Since being resolved, plans have moved ahead as expected with launching to occur on Thursday at 2:45 p.m. EST, with an eleven-day mission on schedule to take up a new crewmember along with the European Space Agency’s Columbus Laboratory up to the International Space Station.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 1st, 2008 at 12:08 am and is filed under Space Agency News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.