CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Lacking the proper laser tools, shuttle Discovery’s astronauts performed a cursory wing inspection Sunday as they zoomed closer to the international space station.
About five pieces of insulating foam broke off Discovery’s external fuel tank during Saturday’s liftoff, and one or two of them may have hit the shuttle.
The astronauts used their ship’s 50-foot robot arm to beam down camera images of the upper edges of the wings so engineers back on Earth could check for any evidence of launch damage. Left unexamined were the lower edges of the wings and the nose cap, also particularly vulnerable hot spots during re-entry.
Astronaut Karen Nyberg, who helped operate the robot arm, said it was “just a quick inspection, as much as we could with what we have.”
The astronauts’ laser-tipped inspection boom is at the space station, left there by the previous shuttle crew in March. They’ll retrieve it after they arrive at the orbiting outpost today and perform a full survey once they depart.
Discovery did not have enough room for the 50-foot boom — standard equipment on shuttle flights after the Columbia tragedy — because of the enormous Japanese lab that fills its payload bay.
NASA officials said they were not too worried about the foam breakage during Saturday’s liftoff because the foam losses occurred after the crucial first two minutes of the flight and therefore lacked the acceleration to do much, if any, damage.
What’s more, the foam fragments looked to be thin and flimsy.
A big wedge of foam carved a hole in Columbia’s wing in 2003 at liftoff and led to the shuttle’s demise during re-entry.
Nyberg said neither she nor her crewmates saw anything wrong as they were surveying Discovery’s wings.
“To me, it looked really good,” flight director Matt Abbott said from Houston.
But he cautioned: “We’ve got a lot of work to do to go through the data.”
NASA will get a good look at Discovery’s belly from close-up photos taken by the space station residents when the shuttle performs a slow backflip right before today’s docking.
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