Discovery’s May 25th Launching May Be Postponed
“Also, the shuttle cannot launch to the International Space Station between May 7 and 25 because the angle of the sun with respect to the plane of the station’s orbit is too high to generate sufficient solar power for the mission,” NASA said in a press release.
*************************************************************************
A recent announcement has been made regarding the space shuttle Discovery’s May 25th launching, officially planning to deliver the second segment of the Japanese Kibo science laboratory to the International Space Station. Unfortunately, bad weather has caused the external tank for the mission to arrive several days late at the Kennedy Space Center. With NASA administrator Mike Griffin seemingly not too worried about the delay, many are still concerned because the Mars Phoenix landing is also scheduled for May 25th, but NASA does not appear concerned about the double schedule. Monitored from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, the Mars Phoenix landing probe will be searching the ice-rich soil of the Martian arctic for signs of life—complex organic molecules—and the shuttle is leaving from Cape Canaveral, in Florida.
It was reported by NASA that the fuel sensor repair work on the two previous missions delayed final preparations of the space shuttle Discovery’s external fuel tank. Six more space shuttle launchings in 2008 are planned by NASA, which includes a service flight to the Hubble Space Telescope, with NASA stating that the remaining flights will not be off-schedule. And the Discovery is still on the schedule for the May 25th flight, so all we can do is hope for the best. And Mike Griffin and some of his managers are acknowledging some chances of delay in the repair mission of the Hubble Space Telescope, scheduled for August, but never fear—nothing in 2008 will be taken off schedule, they say.
The Japanese Kibo laboratory is the largest of the International Space Station’s laboratories, with the first part already on board at the station, delivered by the space shuttle Endeavour, and hopefully its second segment to be delivered by Discovery on May 25th. With about 20 years in its development, Japan has spent more than $2.4 million dollars in its making with many scientific and cultural areas to be focused on:
**The Kibo laboratory will serve as a center of cultural art and orbital dance activities, while simultaneously servings as a workplace for scientific experiments.
** A possible mounting of a high-definition television camera outside the Kibo complex in order to continuously beam pictures of Earth to the ground mission controls.
**The areas that will be focused on are material sciences, fluid physics and biomedicine.
**Consisting of a main pressurized laboratory, a storage room, and an outdoor porch with robotic arms to care for experiments in space.
**Large as a double-decker bus, requires three shuttle flights for launch and assembly.
This entry was posted on Saturday, April 5th, 2008 at 2:27 am and is filed under Space Agency News, Technical Concerns. 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.
