Shuttle will carry high-tech repair kits

By Tariq Malik

updated 4:25 p.m. ET March 2, 2005

When Discovery rockets into space this year on NASA's first shuttle flight in more than two years, the astronauts aboard will carry a bevy of tools and techniques to ensure their spacecraft is safe.

In addition to a redesigned, camera-laden external fuel tank, the seven astronauts assigned to Discovery’s STS-114 mission are toting with them new instruments to repair the shuttle’s thermal protection system, as well as a sensor-capped extension to the orbiter’s robotic arm.

“We’ll know the health of our vehicle,” STS-114 pilot Jim Kelly said during a recent spacewalk training session in NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory tank at Johnson Space Center. “Once we have that, we can make intelligent decisions if something were to happen.”

Discovery is currently set to launch no earlier than May 15 to deliver tools and supplies to the orbiting international space station and test its own new equipment. The planned space shot is NASA’s first shuttle launch since the loss of the Columbia orbiter, which broke up during re-entry, killing its seven-astronaut crew on Feb. 1, 2003.

Two tests for space
Discovery’s two spacewalkers — Soichi Noguchi of the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, and NASA’s Stephen Robinson — plan to test at least two techniques to repair the tiles and reinforced carbon-carbon panels that protect space shuttles from the heat of re-entry.

“Tile and [panel] crack repair is difficult because the tiles are fragile,” Robinson said after completing the spacewalk training session. “And if they’re damaged, they are more fragile.”

Noguchi will test a new tool called the Emittance Wash Applicator, which works somewhat like a liquid glue stick to adhere material to shuttle tiles that boosts their ability to emit heat.

A gray substance, the wash, is loaded into a handheld applicator and squeezed through a foam mesh to be dabbed over a damaged tile, explained Mark Dub, an extravehicular tool engineer at JSC. A layer ranging from one-eighth to one-twenty-fifth of an inch (1 to 3 millimeters) can be applied to tiles with damage reaching down to about half the depth of a standard tile, he added.

While Noguchi focuses on shuttle tiles during one of three STS-114 spacewalks, Robinson will turn his attention to testing a technique to repair small cracks in the  reinforced carbon-carbon panels.

RCC panels line the leading edge of shuttle wings and are designed to bear the highest temperatures experienced during shuttle re-entry. A hole punched by external tank foam into one of Columbia’s leading-edge RCC panels at launch allowed hot gases to enter the wing during re-entry and destroy the orbiter.

“I’ll be looking at fixing cracked RCC panels using kind of a puttylike material,” Robinson said.

The material, a black, heat-resistant substance called non-oxide adhesive experimental, or NOAX, can be applied by squirting it through a space-hardened caulk gun, then smoothing it to fill fine cracks in RCC panels — much like spackle — with a sort of putty knife.

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