NASA STS-118 Execute Package FD07
Good Morning Endeavour!
Happy Birthday Tracy!!!! And in honor of your birthday today, as you begin your 91st orbit in space, the ISS will begin its 50,000th orbit (since FEL). This corresponds to ISS traveling about 2.1 billion km in almost 3170 days!
Once again we want to give all of you a huge thank you for the super job each of you did supporting the EVA yesterday.
We are looking forward to the results of the Handover DTO that you are doing today. Many folks have put a lot of effort into the plan. It will be very interesting to see how feasible this
plan would be to use if we ever got into a situation where it was needed!
Folks continue to work hard on the ground to assess the TPS damage. Thanks to your focused inspection, we have great data on the damage site. The Damage Assessment Team is working from this data to more accurately model the site for CFD testing and analysis, as well as building up actual damaged tile samples to run through the arc-jet. We estimate that we’ll be able to know if we can clear the damage to land as-is about the time you complete EVA-3. This means we’ll go ahead and execute through EVA-3 as per the preflight plan. If a repair is needed, we would target EVA-4 on FD10 at the earliest, possibly moving it to FD11. We’re also working options to take advantage of the cryo margins and add even more docked time to complete TPS repairs. The primary option being looked at for repair will be using the OBSS (with both EVA crewmembers) to do emittance wash followed by an STA-54 underfill of the damaged section using T-RAD. The RMS/OBSS positions are being developed and analyzed, but expectations are that the repair position will have similar stability to what we tested on STS-121. All of this is very preliminary, with lots of forward work ahead. Again, no decision has been made to execute a repair. The FD06 MMT Summary message has details on the TPS as well.
Right now, this is all that we know! We expect to learn a lot more tomorrow and will update you throughout the day!
Questions are always welcome!!
Have a great day installing the ESP3!!!
