Trouble Ten-fold for Discovery and the ISS
In a video press conference this morning, Commander Melroy said “it was a tough situation,” and difficult to monitor the unfolding, because “the sun was shining directly into our camera views.” She had already stopped the deployment once because it was so hard to see what was going on with the arrays. “It happened fairly quickly,” she said.
My mom used to tell me that once something bad happened, that same string of luck would continue in that same vein. This seems to hold true for the space shuttle Discovery and the International Space Station. If you have been keeping up with the news of the recent troubles in our last articles, just add a ‘tad bit more with one of their solar panels ripping with a 2.5-foot tear, seriously threatening the structural integrity of the orbital outpost as it slightly reduced the wings’ energy output.
When the wing tore today, NASA came up with an ingenious plan and slightly radical in order to fix it, but have postponed the Thursday spacewalk to focus on it and changing Friday’s plans for its spacewalk. This week’s spacewalk has already been changed due to the rotary joint which “keeps the solar arrays on the right-hand side of the station pointing toward the Sun.” My mom would say, “So what’s a few more changes?”
And changes there are. First, the tile-repair demonstration was meant for the Thursday spacewalk on the space shuttle. The purpose was to see if various space spackles could fill gouges in the thermal tiles under orbital harsh conditions, developed by NASA. But that gave way to another crisis. Astronaut Tani had found shavings around the rotary joint, which caused NASA to make another plan to find the source of the shavings, determining what repairs may be needed. And then the current crisis which is even more destructive to the overall ISS mission—the tear of the solar array.
According to a New York Times article, “NASA Focuses on Solar Panel Repairs,” by John Schwartz, the new spacewalk changes for Friday or Saturday are based on the fact that the two-and-a-foot tear in the solar array is thought to have been caused by a guide wire snagging on one of the hinges which connected the fanfold panels of the array. But in a briefing with reporters yesterday, Michael T. Suffredini, the space station manager, said that the pileup of problems is challenging but not dire. “It’s not a situation where anybody’s particularly panicked,” Mr. Suffredini said.
At this time, 95% of the power is still being supplied by the panel, and the ribbon cable which carries power to the station is still undamaged. Due to the tear, the panels are only partly extended, which may cause structural problems down the road, as the panels are basically supposed to be used in their full extension. Also, calculations for thruster firings, docking with a space shuttle, or strenuous crew exercise could cause complications. Time will tell in the next few days.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 31st, 2007 at 8:56 pm 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.
