Avatar Posted by facts 510 days ago (http://www.spaceflightnow.com)
Category: Science Discovery Environment | Tags: final decision repair tile damage
NASA's Mission Management Team today ruled out an unprecedented heat shield repair spacewalk and cleared the shuttle Endeavour for re-entry and landing next week "as is" based on computer modeling and tests in a high-temperature furnace that show a small gouge in the ship's belly will not cause serious damage during the fiery plunge to Earth.

Assuming concern about a small tear in a spacesuit glove can be resolved, the MMT cleared the astronauts to press ahead instead with a fourth and final space station assembly spacewalk Saturday that will focus on a variety of relatively low-priority "get ahead" tasks to help pave the way for upcoming missions. If all goes well, Endeavour will undock from the station Monday and glide to a landing at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida around 12:52 p.m. Wednesday to close out an extended two-week mission.

"The MMT made two significant decisions tonight," Shannon said. "The first was a unanimous recommendation that the damage we saw after reviewing all the engineering tests and analysis was not a threat to crew safety, this was not something that the astronauts are in danger about. We had thought that for several days, but we were waiting for the final analysis to be complete.

"We did all the things that we said we were going to do over the last few days. We had engineering analyses, we had computational fluid dynamics of the cavity from both Ames Research Center and the Langley Research Center, they were both in agreement. We did the thermal analysis and that continued to show good margins and we also did two arc jet tests where we put a re-entry heating profile on the damage sites.
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