Page 10 - Orbiter News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Where there were some high-altitude telescopes. these are looking at stars. so if you want to look at the orbiter, you could probably get the entire orbiter fit in the field of view and have extremely good resolution. -and i said, "well, i don't really know much about that, bob. we'll have to check." -and so i got the assurance from wayne that, um, he would make some calls and he would see what -- what could be done, and, um, things were put into motion. ♪ no. you don't want to alarm the crew that early. they had just gotten onto orbit. they have a job to do. when we have the complete story,...

-there are about 31,000 of them all together, and we hope those tiles will stay on when the orbiter comes back into the atmosphere, because otherwise the craft itself could be damaged. -during the development of the space shuttle in the 1970s, there was quite an effort to develop a way to repair damaged tiles on orbit. it was a huge effort... and it was an utter failure. they could not develop anything, and that was one of the "accepted risks" of flying in space. ♪ -okay. good morning. we're ready for roll. -in a meeting, there's 20, 30 people in the room. there's people joining from kennedy...

-they put bleachers close to the runway, and you're driven down there and you're in a set of bleachers with your friends and family that you have invited for the landing. -they had speakers, and you could hear rick talking. -and, rick, we're ready for the manoeuvre. -i did not usually come in for a landing. to me, those were so routine. usually, the orbiter has been working well, they have a good weather call. but i had this wing concern because of the impact. so i said, "i will go in." i realized that most of those people at those consoles -- they don't know anything that's been going on for ...

And they identified very early on and got images early on and everything went about perfectly, just maybe there could have been a rescue mission. but it's questionable whether you could get the other orbiter, which would have been atlantis in this case, processed and out to the pad in time without putting that crew at serious risk. we would have had to pull together this huge effort in the eleventh hour to figure out how to fly one shuttle next to the other to conduct an operation that you'd never trained or prepared for. it was not in the art of the possible given what we knew. -the one tool ...

All of that data pointed to a problem at rcc panel 8. something very different happened in this location on the orbiter. and so, let's go see if we can understand what that was. -ok, so, as the vehicle is entering the atmosphere, these black tiles are protecting the structure, the aluminium of the vehicle, in high-heat areas. and the grey is the wing leading edge reinforced carbon-carbon, rcc panels. those protect the vehicle from the highest level of heat, those 3,000 degree temperatures, so that you don't get metal melting. but we had never had any experience in breaking a panel.