Damage Identified on Endeavour's Underbelly

As the space shuttle Endeavour soared into the skies during its final launch ever, the heat shield that protects the spacecraft during atmospheric reentry may have suffered some minor damage, NASA says.

Engineers and other experts at the American space agency are currently investigating images sent back by the STS-134 crew. The data were collected during the mandatory heat shield inspection that the astronauts carried out on May 17.

Additional datasets were provided by members of Expedition 27 on the International Space Station (ISS). They too snapped photos of Endeavour's underbelly as it was approaching the orbital lab.

Before the orbiter docked to the station, on May 18, it carried out a roll maneuver, during which it pointed its heat shield towards the space facility. The two datasets are now being cross-referenced at NASA, with experts trying to assess the nature of the damage.

During the first analysis, engineers at Mission Control discovered a few spots that may be indicative of damage. These patches may be nothing, technicians say, but they need to be analyzed thoroughly in either case, so as to eliminate any risk.

“I am not concerned about the damage that we're seeing here. It's certainly not alarming, and the team is not concerned about it,” explained the leader of Endeavour's management team, LeRoy Cain, in a statement released yesterday, May 19.

“We do have some repair capability,” Cain said, in reference to the kits that each shuttle now carried.

“Astronauts would go out with a gun-type applicator and we put some material in the cavity. We also have what's called tile overlay. We have a lot of confidence in both of those repair capabilities if we should need to use them,” the official goes on to say.

Heat shield inspection the day after launch and the day before landing have become mandatory for ever shuttle mission since the loss of Columbia in 2003. The spacecraft disintegrated while reentering Earth's atmosphere after a piece of its heat shield was damaged during launch.

In order to prevent such an accident from happening again, NASA has introduced strict safety measures, which are designed to allow experts to identify any prospective damage before it can influence the outcome of the mission.

Back to Endeavour, “I feel pretty confident that if in fact were not able to clear it by the morning, when we get the focused inspection data that we'll be able to clear this problem and not have to do anything,” Cain concludes, quoted by Space.