US astronaut Stephen Robinson successfully tugged out worrisome pieces of filler dangling from space shuttle Discovery’s belly Wednesday in an unprecedented repair mission during his third spacewalk, the NASA group at the Russian Mission Control said.
Reaching Discovery’s belly with the help of the shuttle’s robotic arm and moving deliberately, spacewalking Robinson used his gloved fingers to tug out the two protruding strips of filler with surprising ease.
“I’m grasping it and I’m pulling it and it’s coming out very easily,” Robinson, the first astronaut in the 24-year shuttle program to venture beneath the ship in space, radioed as he performed the largely unrehearsed operation.
Robinson carried a makeshift hacksaw, fashioned out of a blade, plastic ties, duct tape, Velcro, to cut away the material in case the fibers resist the tugging.
“The operation ended successfully,” a spokesman of the NASA group at the Russian Mission Control told the Interfax news agency.
“The operation was called to improve the aerodynamic qualities of the shuttle during re-entry,” the spokesman said.
Robinson removed filler material at the ship’s belly that had stuck out about one inch from the gap between heat protective tiles in two spots near the nose. The upper limit should be about 0.5 centimeter. NASA fears the protruding material could cause dangerous overheating during re-entry, leading to a repeat of the Columbia disaster.
The ceramic coated-fabric gap fillers are used to prevent hot gas from seeping into gaps between the shuttle’s thermal tiles. The intruding hot gas caused shuttle Columbia to disintegrate during re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere on Feb. 1, 2003.
Robinson and his Japanese spacewalking partner Soichi Noguchi, who spent six hours in space, also installed a stowage platform outside the Quest airlock of the space station and replaced some experiment equipment.
Discovery will remain docked at the International Space Station until Saturday and is expected to land on Earth early Monday.
Posted by Administrator in Sci/Tech News