14 DAY TRIAL // Despite the forecast showing 80 percent chances of good weather for Tuesday morning, Mother Nature played a bad joke on NASA mission controllers and the seven-astronaut crew preparing to board space shuttle Discovery for the STS-128 assembly flight to the International Space Station (ISS).
In the wee hours of the morning, rain fell on Launch Pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC), in Cape Canaveral, Florida, breaching the ten-mile radius around the launch site, which is necessary if mission controllers are to authorize a shuttle flight. The take-off has been scrubbed for today, with Discovery scheduled to make another attempt on Wednesday morning, at 1:10 am EDT (0510 GMT), the BBC News reports.
According to eyewitnesses, lightning strikes fell within only a few miles of the launch pad, which prompted controllers and NASA officials to abort the launch sequence just minutes before the scheduled take-off time. The delay couldn't have come at a worse time, after the space agency just narrowly allowed the shuttle to fly today, after concerns that its foam insulation, located on the external tanks, might fall during this mission as well and strike the shuttle's sensitive heat shield tiles. Once in orbit, there is little astronauts can do to repair them, although basic tools became available to shuttles after the 2003 Columbia tragedy.
Using high-power X-rays and other observation tools, NASA engineers spent many hours over the past few days on the external fuel tank, closely analyzing the foam layer. They determined that it posed no dangers to the shuttle. The experts couldn't find anything wrong with it, not even defects as small as micro-cracks. “We are go for launch,” the Head of Discovery's mission management team, Mike Moses, said Sunday night. Discovery has already been loaded with its 15,200-pound (6,894-kilogram) supplies.
During the STS-128 assembly flight to the ISS, the shuttle will ferry a new station crew member to orbit. NASA astronaut Nicole Stott will replace Expedition 20 flight engineer Timothy Kopra as Commander Gennedy Padalka's aid on the orbital facility. Vital supplies will also be taken to the outpost, alongside a number of new scientific experiments, and a treadmill named after comedian Steven Colbert. Discovery's journey will take 13 days, and, during the mission, three spacewalks will be performed.