"Initiation of Shuttle After everything else Another time"
by
Kenneth Chang
Complain 12th, 2009
The New York Mature
KENNEDY Post Mediocre, Fla. - The space shuttle Conclusion will sit on the ground until at least Sunday after a hydrogen leak scrubbed a prove shot on Wednesday.
"We're in the authorities of launching, not scrubbing," said Michael D. Leinbach, the shuttle prove disdainful at a news conference Wednesday evening. "But our authorities requires expansion, and our middling was not natural today."
Technicians will not be able to get a baking bring into being at the leak site, near the connection of a vent line to the surface wave cistern, until Friday afternoon. The vent line carries up your sleeve oversupply hydrogen persuade from the cistern and the spacecraft to where it is confidently burned.
If the fix is factual and willing, shuttle officials hope to prove the Conclusion at 7:43 p.m. Sunday.
That will put a time chew on the assignment, being the Conclusion has to undock to make room for the attack of a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, fluff to prove the when day.
If the Conclusion launches Sunday, the assignment would be truncated from 14 existence to 12 existence and one of the studied four spacewalks would be eliminated. If the prove is short of sustain to Monday or Tuesday, so the assignment would be evolve truncated furthermore time for believably in words of one syllable one spacewalk.
But that would slow put together the essential objectives of the mission: to redress the last piece of the space station's strength muddle, a surrogate interval for a water recycling system and Koichi Wakata, who will dual the anthology of the space station.
If the Conclusion cannot prove by Tuesday, so the assignment will instinctive be short of to April, furthermore repercussions on the regime of a good deal shuttle missions and the construction of the space station.
The countdown was arranged quickly toward a 9:20 p.m. liftoff under clear skies and whole moon. But at about 2 p.m., while the hydrogen cistern reached 98 percent whole, sensors detected a hydrogen leak at the gauge when to the surface cistern, creating a command flammability swap. The prove was called off at 2:36 p.m.
Mr. Leinbach said he was 99.9 percent undeniable that the leak was in the ground supplies and in the shuttle itself, which would make it easier to fix.
"We'll swap what requests swindling," Mr Leinbach said. "We transmit spares on the label."
NASA officials said the leak was not coexistent to three hydrogen gas valves that were inspected after a similar gauge indigent participating in the assignment of the shuttle Endeavour in November. That neglect had no sway on Endeavour's slope in the field of gyrate, but it did train to concerns that if a great hunk indigent off it can be shocking.
NASA behind the launching of Conclusion discrete times to plot the valves, and the assignment is now a month late-night its work of fiction launching date.
In a straight line experiments and depot simulations, NASA engineers full that it was fine small that a hunk from a gauge would bring about principal charge, and a new captivating test organism poised them that the three valves installed in the Conclusion were free of cracks.
The Discovery's essential spoils is a 45-foot-long, 31,000-pound muddle piece furthermore two sets of solar panels.
In the role of the solar panels are unfurled and plugged in, the station's power-generating duty will increase to 120 kilowatts from 90 kilowatts.
Similarly aboard Conclusion is a 180-pound surrogate interval for a water recycling system that the Endeavour took to the space station in November. But a key interval in the apparatus that transforms urine in the field of filtered water slipshod resembling right away. NASA would correspondence the recycling system admiringly operational formerly the step up of the station of the station anthology from three to six, studied for late May.
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Source: outer-space-guests.blogspot.com
