Wed, Nov 17, 2010
Mission Managers Will Announce No Earlier Than November
22nd
NASA managers will hold a news conference no earlier than 1800
EST on Monday, Nov. 22, at the agency's Johnson Space Center in
Houston to discuss the next space shuttle mission, STS-133, which
was delayed on Nov. 5.
NASA officials will announce the status of repairs to a leaking
hydrogen system that caused the initial delay. They also will
discuss the cracks on the tops of two, 21-foot-long support beams,
called stringers, on the exterior of the shuttle's external fuel
tank in an area known as the intertank. The next launch window for
space shuttle Discovery and six NASA astronauts begins Nov. 30.
Technicians worked Tuesday on the installation of new quick
disconnect hardware in the recently-installed ground umbilical
carrier plate (GUCP) to fix a hydrogen gas leak that scrubbed space
shuttle Discovery's launch Nov. 5. Technicians installed a new
flight seal in the GUCP attached to Discovery's external fuel tank
last Friday night and spent the weekend taking precise measurements
of the hardware to ensure all components are properly aligned and
prevent another hydrogen leak.
Another team of technicians is working on repairing cracks on
the tops of two, 21-foot-long support beams, called stringers, on
the exterior of the external tank in an area known as the
intertank. The team includes personnel from the external tank
manufacturing plant in Louisiana, the Michoud Assembly
Facility.
Over the weekend, technicians removed a section of one of the
stringers that had two, 9-inch cracks in it. Last Friday, during
foam removal and inspection of adjacent stringers to the one with
the 9-inch cracks, technicians identified a crack about 3-inches
long on the left-hand adjacent stringer. Further foam removal
revealed one additional corresponding crack on the same left-hand
adjacent stringer. Technicians plan to remove that section of the
stringer Monday night. They'll also install a new section of metal,
called a doubler because it's twice as thick as the original
stringer metal, on the stringer that had the 9-inch cracks.
Engineers continue evaluating the intertank for any potential
issues, but so far no other cracks have been found beyond the ones
on the two previously identified stringers. There are a total of
108 stringers on the intertank.
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