Cape Canaveral, Fla. – NASA postponed the return of Atlantis for at least a day and examined the shuttle for damage that could prevent it from making the journey home after a mysterious object apparently fell off the ship in orbit Tuesday.
Space agency officials wanted extra time to establish whether the object was a vital piece of the shuttle – such as the tiles that protect it from the blowtorch heat of re-entry – and whether it harmed the spacecraft when it fell away.
Officials were not optimistic that they would be able to identify the object because the possibilities were almost endless, ranging from harmless ice to crucial thermal protection tiles.
But the leading candidate was a plastic space-filler placed between the thermal tiles. If that is the case, the missing filler would not prevent a normal landing.
“The question is: What is it? Is it something benign? … Or is it something more critical we should pay attention to?” said Wayne Hale, space-shuttle program manager. “We want to make sure we’re safe to land before we commit to that rather incredible journey through the Earth’s atmosphere.”
NASA was concentrating more on making sure the shuttle is safe than identifying the object, Hale said. Crews often report “a little cloud of stuff that travels with your spacecraft” but in the past have not been as concerned, Hale said. That was before the 2003 Columbia disaster.
