14 DAY TRIAL // Late on Sunday, officials at the US space agency NASA cleared the space shuttle Discovery for launch on the STS-128 assembly mission to the International Space Station. The flight is scheduled to begin at 1:36 am EDT (0536 GMT), from Launch Pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC), in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The shuttle has an 80-percent chance of good weather during take-off, an increase from the 70 percent recorded on Saturday. Discovery's flight will last 13 days, Space reports.
Mission controllers have been concerned with the foam insulation on the shuttle's external tank over the past couple of weeks. In previous flights, such as the one conducted by shuttle Atlantis to the Hubble Space Telescope, and shuttle Endeavor to the ISS, large pieces of the stuff broke off and fell on the shuttles, fortunately without any major damage to their heat shields. However, officials were not about to take that chance again.
Using high-power X-rays and other observation tools, NASA engineers spent many hours on the fuel tank, closely analyzing the foam layer. They determined that it posed no dangers to Discovery. 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. The spacecraft has been loaded with its 15,200-pound (6,894-kilogram) cargo, and is awaiting its fuel.
During the 13-day mission, Discovery will deliver new ISS flight engineer Nicole Smith, who will replace NASA astronaut Timothy Kopra, flown to the space lab by shuttle Endeavor. New science gear and fresh supplies are also aboard Discovery, as are spare parts for the station. The new Multi-Purpose Logistics Module Leonardo will also be ferried to the football field-long lab. A total of three spacewalks are planned for STS-128, dealing with maintenance work, and preparing the starboard truss and the Unity node for the arrival of the Tranquility node, currently scheduled for February, 2010.