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METEOR SHOWER: The Southern Delta Aquarid meteor shower peaks on July 28th. Go outside before dawn on Friday morning, look south, and you could see a meteor every five minutes or so.

http://www.spaceweather.com/images2006/28jul06/skymap_north.jpg

No one knows where these meteors come from. They could be remains of a long-dead comet or debris from an asteroid-asteroid collision. Curious fact: There is a debris stream nearly parallel to this one. Earth will pass through it on August 8th, producing the Northern Delta Aquarid meteor shower. It's a mystery, too.
 
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5578853

Search Is on for Original Apollo 11 Footage

Morning Edition, July 31, 2006 · Almost everyone on the planet who had access to television watched the first moon landing, back on the night of July 20, 1969. What the TV viewers didn't know is that they weren't seeing the best images.

The astronauts actually beamed higher-quality footage back to Earth, but it was only seen by a small number of people at three tracking stations.

Those original images were recorded and put into storage -- somewhere. Now, a small crew of retirees, space enthusiasts, and NASA employees are searching for a moon landing that the world has never seen.

Houston, The Image Is Degraded

One of them is Stan Lebar. On that historic night, he was 44 years old and sitting in Houston's Mission Control Center building. His team at Westinghouse Corporation had spent five years designing a TV camera that would work in the harsh lunar environment, and he was waiting to see whether they had pulled it off.

When the lunar module touched down in the Sea of Tranquility, Neil Armstrong radioed in, "Houston, uh, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed." Moments later, Mission Control asked Buzz Aldrin to power up the camera: "Buzz, this is Houston, radio check and verify TV circuit-breaker in."

As the camera powered up, Lebar and his colleagues in the TV lab finally saw a signal. It was just a line on a screen, but it meant the camera was working.

"That's when we opened the champagne bottles," he recalls.

As the first images appeared on a screen in Houston's main mission-control room, the flight directors were thrilled. But back in the TV lab, Lebar says the mood had changed.

"What disturbed us is when we saw the imagery, we knew that something had gone wrong," he says.

For hundreds of millions of people watching, the picture was truly amazing; it was, after all, live footage from the moon, some 240,000 miles away. But it was hard to make out what was what in the dark, fuzzy scene. The astronauts' legs were ghostly as they came down the ladder.

"So they were saying, 'This is great!'" recalls Lebar. "And the truth of the matter was, it was being degraded something awful."

Converting the Originals

The images were being degraded because the lunar camera was recording in a format that was incompatible with commercial-television broadcasts. So the footage had to be converted to the right format.

Here's how it worked: The lunar camera was sending images to three tracking stations: Goldstone in California, and Honeysuckle Creek and Parkes in Australia. At these stations, the original footage could be displayed on a monitor.

To convert the originals, engineers essentially took a commercial television camera and aimed it at the monitor. The resulting image is what was sent to Houston, and on to the world.

"And any time you just point a camera at a screen, that's obviously not the best way to get the best picture," says Richard Nafzger, a TV specialist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. He worked with Apollo's lunar TV program, and says that conversion was the best they could do at the time.

"We're talking 1969. In today's digital world, it's pretty much a relic. But that's what it was," he says.

The original lunar footage did get recorded -- onto 14-inch spools of magnetic tape, along with telemetry data. And by 1970, the tapes had made their way to a giant government facility known as the National Records Center in Suitland, Md. Soon after that, records show that NASA brought the tapes to Goddard for "permanent retention."

A Race Against Time

Fast forward to April 2002. Someone who'd worked at one of the Australian tracking stations finds a tape in his garage. He thinks it's a copy he made of the original, high-quality footage. It goes to Building 25 at Goddard Space Flight Center, which houses the Data Evaluation Lab. This lab is full of giant blue cabinets that hold 40-year-old playback machines.

"This is equipment that would process any tapes we find of the original television," says Nafzger, who adds that this lab is the only place left that can play NASA tapes from the Apollo era.

It turned out, the Australian tape wasn't the moonwalk; it was a simulation from 1967. But it made Nafzger and others keen to find the originals.

Unfortunately, no one has been able to. Nothing suggests that the tapes were moved from Goddard or destroyed. Yet there's also no record of where exactly they're supposed to be.

The Data Evaluation Lab will be shut down in October. But Nafzger plans to save a few of the machines, in case the tapes turn up. He and Stan Lebar are talking with the retirees, sorting through old documents and hoping someone will call them with a tip.

"One of the reasons we're fighting so hard is that we're fighting against the clock," says Lebar.

The tapes will degrade over time, and all the people who worked on Apollo aren't getting any younger either. Lebar is 81 years old.

He says, in retrospect, the murky images that got broadcast on TV were thrilling. Their strange quality just underlined that this was an unearthly event.

"Walter Cronkite said, you know, it was really ghostly-like. It was really what it should have been," Lebar says. "If it was full-up resolution as standard television, nobody would have thought it was as great."

Still, Lebar would dearly love to see the original footage.

"What do we provide for posterity, when we know there is something better?" he asks.

At least everyone knows where the camera is: The astronauts traded it for moon rocks. Lebar says it's still up there, in the dusty Sea of Tranquility.

"People ask, 'If they ever bring it back, will it work?'" he laughs. "My answer is: 'Sure, why not?' I've got the ultimate optimism."

That optimism is what makes him certain that somehow, somewhere, they will find the lost Apollo 11 tapes.
 
http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/space/08/02/shuttle.ap/index.html

Atlantis rolls out to launch pad

Wednesday, August 2, 2006

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (AP) -- Space shuttle Atlantis was hauled to the launch pad early Wednesday, a major step toward a mission to resume construction of the international space station for the first time in three years.

The pre-dawn trip to the launch pad was delayed twice this week because of stormy weather.

The four-mile trek from the Vehicle Assembly Building, or VAB, started shortly after 1 a.m. ET and took under eight hours. (Watch Atlantis as it is hauled out to the launch pad -- 1:15)

In the next few days, fuel and power lines will be hooked up to the vehicle, the shuttle's auxiliary power units will be test-fired and cargo will be loaded onto the shuttle.

Next week, Atlantis' crew arrives at the Kennedy Space Center for a week of dress rehearsals that include a practice launch countdown, an exercise to practice escaping from the launch pad and instruction on using emergency equipment.

Atlantis hasn't flown since October 2002, and there has been no construction on the international space station since December 2002. During the 11-day mission, Atlantis' six astronauts are scheduled to conduct three spacewalks and deliver and install a 35,000-pound addition with giant solar arrays that power the space station.

The deadly Columbia accident in early 2003 halted all expansion of the orbiting space lab and forced a reduction in the crew size from three to two.

The crew size returned to three members last month after space shuttle Discovery delivered European Space Station astronaut Thomas Reiter to the international space station.

The window for launching Atlantis starts August 27 and lasts until September 13, but NASA managers are considering opening up the window a day earlier. NASA managers are wary of launching the shuttle too late in the window since a Russian Soyuz vehicle with three crew members is scheduled to launch from Kazakhstan on a trip to the international space station in mid-September.

Atlantis' launch will be the second of the year, and only the third shuttle mission since the Columbia disaster killed seven astronauts.
 
Hey, how many Summers are you gonna waste?

At least quit being so cowardly one of these days, will you.
 
Batchoohus said:
alpha charley two four niner
no disrespect intended :)
Click to expand...

no problem. I'm just trying to figure out what Song's issue is. He/she (cause I've yet to pay attention enough to figure out which Song may be) really seems like it is time to reach back and twist the stick in said ass.
 
linuxgeek said:
no problem. I'm just trying to figure out what Song's issue is. He/she (cause I've yet to pay attention enough to figure out which Song may be) really seems like it is time to reach back and twist the stick in said ass.
Click to expand...
*gulp*
I hadn't seen this thread before and now that I have, I have found it refreshing. Thank you.
 
Wow!

HOBART, Australia - Some of the coldest temperatures on Earth brought a rare cloud formation to the skies over Antarctica, scientists said Tuesday.

Meteorological officer Renae Baker captured spectacular images of the nacreous clouds, also known as polar stratospheric clouds, last week at Australia's Mawson station in Antarctica.

The clouds only occur at high polar latitudes in winter, requiring temperatures less than minus 176 degrees Fahrenheit. A weather balloon measured temperatures at minus 189 degrees Fahrenheit on the day the photos were taken.

Resembling airborne mother-of-pearl shells, the clouds are produced when fading light at sunset passes through water-ice crystals blown along a strong jet of stratospheric air more than six miles above the ground.

"Amazingly, the winds at this height were blowing at nearly 230 kilometers (143 miles) per hour," Baker said on the Australian government's Antarctic Division's Web site.

Australian Antarctic Division atmospheric scientist Andrew Klekociuk said the clouds are seldom seen, but are occasionally produced by air passing over polar mountains.

"You have to be in the right part of the world in winter, and have the sun just below your horizon to see them," he said.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060801/ap_on_sc/antarctica_clouds_4

http://www.smh.com.au/ffximage/2006/08/01/snapscloud_wideweb__470x308,0.jpg
 
Lost Cause said:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0607/swarm_cxc_labelf.jpg

Monitoring a region around the center of our Galaxy, astronomers have indeed found evidence for a surprisingly large number of variable x-ray sources - likely black holes or neutron stars in binary star systems - swarming around the Milky Way's own central supermassive black hole.

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap060729.html :eek:
Click to expand...

When I first heard about a very massive black hole at the center of our galaxy it made so much sense! It had never occured to me to wonder what we were circling, that had so much gravitational mass. The smaller circling systems (like ours) are interesting in that they are all around and through the entire Milky Way. These kinds of repeated circular patterns occur throughout our universe in smaller systems (our own solar system) to unbelievably large ones (our galaxy)... and then there are the countless galaxies (and dark matter?) everywhere outside of our own...is the total mass of the universe circling a really massive black hole at the center of itself?

Anyone here into Chaos Theory and hidden order?
 
Last edited:
Just in case anyone is an early riser...

Venus and Mercury will both be visible just before dawn on the Eastern Horizon. They are less than a handspan apart.
 
http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/space/08/16/new.planets.ap/index.html

Proposal would increase planets from 9 to 12
Wednesday, August 16, 2006

PRAGUE, Czech Republic (AP) -- Our solar system would have 12 planets instead of nine under a proposed "Big Bang" expansion by leading astronomers, changing what billions of schoolchildren are taught about their corner of the cosmos.

Much-maligned Pluto would remain a planet -- and its largest moon plus two other heavenly bodies would join Earth's neighborhood -- under a draft resolution to be formally presented Wednesday to the International Astronomical Union, the arbiter of what is and is not a planet.

"Yes, Virginia, Pluto is a planet," quipped Richard Binzel, a professor of planetary science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (Watch an expert explain how a planet can just be a big, round thing -- 5:11)

The proposal could change, however: Binzel and the other nearly 2,500 astronomers from 75 nations meeting in Prague to hammer out a universal definition of a planet will hold two brainstorming sessions before they vote on the resolution next week. But the draft comes from the IAU's executive committee, which only submits recommendations likely to get two-thirds approval from the group.

Besides reaffirming the status of puny Pluto -- whose detractors insist should not be a planet at all -- the new lineup would include 2003 UB313, the farthest-known object in the solar system and nicknamed Xena; Pluto's largest moon, Charon; and the asteroid Ceres, which was a planet in the 1800s before it was demoted.

The panel also proposed a new category of planets called "plutons," referring to Pluto-like objects that reside in the Kuiper Belt, a mysterious, disc-shaped zone beyond Neptune containing thousands of comets and planetary objects. Pluto itself and two of the potential newcomers -- Charon and 2003 UB313 -- would be plutons.

Astronomers also were being asked to get rid of the term "minor planets," which long has been used to collectively describe asteroids, comets and other non-planetary objects. Instead, those would become collectively known as "small solar system bodies."

If the resolution is approved, the 12 planets in our solar system listed in order of their proximity to the sun would be Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Ceres, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Charon, and the provisionally named 2003 UB313. Its discoverer, Michael Brown of the California Institute of Technology, nicknamed it Xena after the warrior princess of TV fame, but it likely would be rechristened something else later, the panel said.

The galactic shift would force publishers to update encyclopedias and school textbooks, and elementary school teachers to rejigger the planet mobiles hanging from classroom ceilings. Far outside the realm of science, astrologers accustomed to making predictions based on the classic nine might have to tweak their formulas.

Even if the list of planets is officially lengthened when astronomers vote on Aug. 24, it is not likely to stay that way for long: The IAU has a "watchlist" of at least a dozen other potential candidates that could become planets once more is known about their sizes and orbits.

"The solar system is a middle-aged star, and like all middle-aged things, its waistline is expanding," said Jack Horkheimer, director of the Miami Space Transit Planetarium in the United States and host of Public Broadcasting's Stargazer television show.

Opponents of Pluto, which was named a planet in 1930, still might spoil for a fight. Earth's moon is larger; so is 2003 UB313 (Xena), about 70 miles (113 kilometers) wider.

But the IAU said Pluto meets its proposed new definition of a planet: any round object larger than 800 kilometers (nearly 500 miles) in diameter that orbits the sun and has a mass roughly one-12,000th that of Earth. Moons and asteroids will make the grade if they meet those basic tests.

Roundness is key, experts said, because it indicates an object has enough self-gravity to pull itself into a spherical shape. Yet Earth's moon would not qualify because the two bodies' common center of gravity lies below the surface of the Earth.

"There are as many opinions about Pluto as there are astronomers," Binzel said. "But Pluto has gravity on its side. By the physics of our proposed definition, Pluto makes it by a long shot."

IAU President Ronald D. Ekers said the draft definition, two years in the making, was an attempt to reach a cosmic consensus and end decades of quarreling. "We don't want an American version, a European version and a Japanese version" of what constitutes a planet, he said.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium at New York's American Museum of Natural History -- miscast as a "Pluto-hater," he contends, merely because Pluto was excluded from a planetarium solar system exhibit -- said the new guidelines would clear up the fuzzier aspects of the Milky Way.

"For the first time since ancient Greece, we have an unambiguous definition," he said. "Now, when an object is debated as a possible planet, the answer can be swift and clear."
 
http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/space/08/16/space.shuttle.reut/index.html

NASA sets shuttle Atlantis launch date
Wednesday, August 16, 2006

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) -- NASA will attempt to launch space shuttle Atlantis on August 27 to restart construction of the half-built international space station, officials of the U.S. space agency said Wednesday.

"We set the launch date for the 27th, I think it's around 4:30 in the afternoon, so we're ready to go for that," Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA's associate administrator for space operations, told reporters at Cape Canaveral.

Atlantis' mission will be the first flight to resume construction of the half-built $100-billion space station since the shuttle Columbia fell apart over Texas in 2003.

Two shuttle missions conducted since Columbia tested safety upgrades designed to avoid a repeat of the accident, when falling insulation foam from the external fuel tank knocked a hole in the shuttle's wing on liftoff. Superheated atmospheric gases tore into the breach two weeks later on re-entry.

Construction of the space station, meanwhile, had been on hold because the U.S. shuttles are the only spacecraft capable of carrying its larger components into orbit.

The resumption of the assembly of the orbital outpost, a multi-nation project, became possible after the safe return to Earth last month of space shuttle Discovery.

Its 13-day mission had successfully tested repair techniques and ways to examine the shuttle's fragile heat shield while in space.
 
anybody catch the Perseids? Were they any good?

The last bunch of stupid meteor showers have been busts. Leonids, pfft. Quadrantids sucked ass, and I'm not holding my breath for the Orionids or the Geminids either.
 
unfortunately, too much light polution around these parts to see much of anything.
 
I caught a drive in movie Sat night and witnessed 9 just looking at the screen. Pretty darn cool.
 
 
SpaceX, Rocketplane win spaceship contest
$485 million to be doled out for new ways to resupply space station

By Alan Boyle
Science editor
MSNBC
Updated: 8:13 p.m. ET Aug 18, 2006


Two aerospace teams headed by SpaceX and Rocketplane Kistler will share almost half a billion dollars set aside for demonstrations of new spaceships capable of transporting cargo and crew between Earth and the international space station, NASA announced Friday.

The Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program, or COTS, marks a dramatic departure in the way NASA does business and could give a boost to the nascent private-sector space race — including space tourism for paying passengers.

NASA Administrator Mike Griffin acknowledged earlier this week that the program could also turn out to be a $500 million flop. "If it doesn’t work, I’ve frankly made the wrong bet … with a good amount of money that we could have used for other purposes if the entrepreneurial sector is, in fact, not able to step up," he told Space.com.

Critics of NASA's traditional approach to spaceship development, on the other hand, tend to see COTS and similar initiatives as the space agency's best hope. "If anything's going to get us out of this hole, it is this new entrepreneurial spirit," Jerry Pournelle, a science-fiction author who also served as a space policy adviser to the Reagan administration, told MSNBC.com.

With the rise of less expensive rockets, "we will see human transportation to low Earth orbit become more of a reality in the next four or five years," said Will Trafton, executive vice president for business development at Rocketplane Kistler.

Elon Musk, SpaceX's founder and chief executive officer, told MSNBC.com that "this is going to be the best value for money that NASA and the American taxpayers have ever received."

Two approaches to funding spaceships
In the past, NASA has funded the entire development cost for creating spaceships for human spaceflight, ranging from Mercury capsules to space shuttles. This approach is still being used for the development of the main successor to the space shuttle fleet, known as the Crew Exploration Vehicle or CEV. Two teams, led by Lockheed Martin on one side and Northrop Grumman and Boeing on the other, are vying for that multibillion-dollar project — and NASA is expected to announce the winner of the CEV contract sometime in the next couple of months.

COTS is different in that NASA will be merely "investing" in projects primarily supported by the private sector, with quarterly payments made as the development teams reach technical and financial milestones through the end of 2009. The final milestones call for three test flights, including an unmanned flight to the space station itself, said Alan Lindenmoyer, commercial crew/cargo project manager at NASA.

The spaceships developed with NASA's support could well help fill the gap between the scheduled 2010 retirement of the shuttle fleet and the start of CEV flights in the 2012-2014 time frame.

When the first phase of the COTS program runs out in 2010, NASA says it will conduct another competition for pay-as-you-go contracts to resupply the space station. Officials have compared it to renting a moving van rather than having one custom-built for your exclusive use. Such "vans" can be used for non-NASA purposes as well, ranging from private-passenger joy rides to commercial research flights.

The applicants for those future NASA contracts are likely to include Friday's winners, but would also be open to other COTS competitors that were passed over.

Unlike Boeing and Lockheed Martin, SpaceX and Rocketplane Kistler are unaccustomed to having a lead role in the development of piloted spaceships. Now they will manage $485 million between them. NASA is setting aside another $15 million from the half-billion-dollar program for its own program costs, Lindenmoyer told MSNBC.com.

SpaceX's plans
California-based SpaceX, or Space Exploration Technologies, has been developing a line of Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 rockets, as well as its Dragon capsule for cargo and crew. However, so far it has made only one launch attempt, which ended in failure.

http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/j/msnbc/Components/Photos/060308/060308_dragon_hmed_7p.widec.jpg
An artist's rendering shows a semitransparent view of SpaceX's Dragon reusable space capsule.

Musk said SpaceX's partners included Spacehab, which was also a COTS finalist in its own right; ARES Corp.; Odyssey Space Research; and MacDonald Detwiler & Associates, which built the robotic arms for the space station and the shuttle fleet. Paragon Space Development Corp. is on the SpaceX team as well as the Rocketplane team, said the company's CEO, Taber McCallum.

If SpaceX hits all of NASA's milestones, its team would receive $278 million, Lindenmoyer said. He said SpaceX's proposal was particularly attractive because its launch vehicle could be recovered and refurbished — and eventually could be fully reusable.

Musk said the Falcon/Dragon system could be used to resupply the space station as well as take passengers to private-sector space complexes such as those currently being tested by Bigelow Aerospace. "We expect Bigelow to be a significant customer along the road," he said.

That meshes with NASA's intentions, he said: "NASA really wants us to find markets outside just them in manned spaceflight."

Musk declined to say precisely how much the Falcon/Dragon flights would cost on a per-pound or per-flight basis, but was confident his team could bring down the cost of access to space dramatically. Currently, the cheapest way to send people to space is aboard Russia's Soyuz spacecraft, which is thought to cost in the neighborhood of $30 million to $50 million per launch.

"We expect to be quite a bit more cost-effective than Soyuz, and as you know, Soyuz is 6 or 7 percent of the cost of the space shuttle," Musk told MSNBC.com.

Rocketplane Kistler's plans
Oklahoma-based Rocketplane Kistler, meanwhile, plans to adapt the Kistler K-1 reusable launch vehicle — which has been under development for years by Kistler Aerospace but has never flown. Rocketplane acquired financially troubled Kistler just this year, specifically to go after the COTS money.

http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/j/msnbc/Components/Photos/060727/060727_k1_vmed_5p.standard.jpg
An artist's conception shows the Kistler K-1 rocket.

Rocketplane's Trafton said partners on the team included Orbital Sciences, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Aerojet, Draper Laboratory, Honeywell, Oceaneering International, ATA Engineering and RS&H. A Rocketplane news release also mentioned Orbitec, Irvin Aerospace and the Italian aerospace company Alenia Spazio.

About $207 million has been allocated to the Rocketplane Kistler team, Lindenmoyer said. One of the big factors in the team's favor was that "they are using pretty much known technology, repackaging it and trying to take advantage of this reuse," he told MSNBC.com.

"It's not a great deal of technical risk in the system," he explained.

Rocketplane has been working on a suborbital spaceship that could be ready for flight in 2008, and Trafton said the first Kistler K-1 orbital rocket could lift off from Australia in late 2008. He said his company was looking into developing a Cape Canaveral launch site as well, and studying the design for a crew-capable vehicle that would fit atop the K-1. The crew vehicle could enter service in the 2011-2012 time frame, he said.

"The price to get a payload to low Earth orbit is going to be a fraction of what it has been for the past 15 or so years," he told MSNBC.com.

For both companies, the NASA money represents a supplement to private investment. "They each have significant 'skin' in the game," said Scott Horowitz, NASA's associate administrator for exploration systems.

For example, Musk said SpaceX would invest $200 million in the Falcon/Dragon program — on top of the $100 million he already has spent on the Falcon 1. Trafton declined to provide a specific figure but said Rocketplane's contribution would exceed NASA's on a 2-to-1 basis — implying an investment of more than $400 million.

Other contenders
Horowitz said he hoped that the first phase of the COTS process would "create an optimum portfolio" for the second phase, involving actual space station resupply.

It's possible that someone could "come out of left field" and win a Phase 2 contract even though they didn't receive NASA money in Phase 1, he said. That means the four other finalists in the Phase 1 competition could still be in the running in 2010. Those also-rans included:

  • Texas-based Spacehab, which built research modules for the space shuttle. Spacehab offered its Apex line of spacecraft for the COTS competition. Its partners included Adam Aircraft, The Aerospace Corp., Emergent Space Technologies, Oceaneering and BAE Systems National Security Solutions.
  • The Virginia-based t/Space consortium, which has been working on a Crew Transfer Vehicle, or CXV. The consortium includes AirLaunch, Constellation Services International, Orion Propulsion, Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute and RedZone Robotics, Universal Space Lines — and Scaled Composites, which built the SpaceShipOne rocket plane.
  • California-based SpaceDev, which worked on SpaceShipOne's hybrid rocket engine and proposed its Dream Chaser mini-shuttle concept. Its partners included Adam Aircraft, The Aerospace Corp., Emergent Space Technologies, Oceaneering and BAE Systems National Security Solutions.
  • Andrews Space of Seattle, which already has received an Air Force contract to flesh out a Hybrid Launch Vehicle concept.

All the finalists said that they would pursue their spaceship projects even if they didn't share in the $500 million from NASA.

The amount of money set aside for the COTS winners was misstated in a headline appearing on an earlier version of this report.
© 2006 MSNBC Interactive

story
 
NASA workers complete shuttle repair
Atlantis to launch next week for space station construction mission

http://media.msnbc.msn.com/i/msnbc/Components/Sources/sourceReuters.gif
Updated: 2:38 p.m. ET Aug 20, 2006


CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - Workers at the Kennedy Space Center on Sunday completed a delicate launch pad repair job on the shuttle Atlantis, which is being prepared for liftoff next week to restart International Space Station construction.

Working mid-air on platforms to reach the top of Atlantis' 60-foot(18-meter)-long payload bay, technicians removed two short bolts that held the main communications antenna in place and installed longer fasteners.

"The bolt change-out is all done. They're just removing all the work platforms," said Kennedy Space Center spokeswoman Tracy Young.

The wrong bolts have been in place since Atlantis was manufactured 25 years ago. Torque tests done before the old bolts were removed showed that the antenna was securely anchored, Young said.

"As a precaution, we changed them out anyway. Better to be safe than sorry," she said.

Incorrectly sized antenna bolts also were found and replaced on shuttles Discovery and Endeavour. Atlantis already had been moved to the launch pad when the error was brought to the attention of NASA managers. Replacing the bolts while the shuttle was in a vertical position at the pad greatly complicated the procedure.

The shuttle's cargo bay is filled with a 35,000-pound (15,750-kg) station power module that holds new solar arrays and a rotary joint so the panels can track the sun. Atlantis is scheduled for liftoff on Aug. 27 on NASA's first construction mission in nearly four years.

Construction on the half-built space station stopped after the 2003 Columbia disaster. Since then, NASA has flown two shuttle missions to test safety upgrades imposed after the fatal accident.

The agency needs to finish building the station before the shuttles, which are the only vehicles suited for the job, are retired in 2010. About 16 more flights are planned.


story
 
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