CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Space shuttle Endeavour pulled up to the international space station and docked Wednesday, kicking off almost two weeks of demanding construction work.
Before the late-night linkup, Endeavour’s commander, Dominic Gorie, guided the shuttle through a 360-degree backflip to allow for full photographic surveillance.
It’s one of the many safety-related procedures put in place following the Columbia tragedy in 2003.
The space station crew used cameras with high-powered zoom lenses to photograph Endeavour from nose to tail, especially all the thermal tiles on its belly. The pictures — as many as 300 — will be scrutinized by engineers on the ground to see whether the shuttle suffered any damage during Tuesday’s nighttime launch.
Something, maybe a bird, may have struck Endeavour’s nose nine or 10 seconds after liftoff. The launch images are inconclusive so far. NASA expects that images collected during the astronauts’ laser inspection of the nose and wings will reveal any damage, if it’s there.
LeRoy Cain, chairman of the mission management team, said the launch video suggests to some that Endeavour’s nose took a hit. Still photos, on the other hand, show no impact.
“It’s too early to speculate,” Cain said late Wednesday afternoon. “The team has got a lot of work to do on that as well as other debris items.”
Also, right at liftoff, something seemed to fall off the tail end of the shuttle, possibly part of a thermal tile. Later, at the 83-second mark, a piece of debris, possibly fuel-tank foam insulation, appeared to miss the shuttle’s right wing.
“There’s nothing that stands out in terms of things that we’re worried about,” Cain said.
Endeavour’s seven astronauts began their day Wednesday with an invigorating wake-up call from Mission Control: loud rock ‘n’ roll music with the refrain “Go, go, Godzilla.” It was dedicated to the crew’s Japanese engineer, Takao Doi.
“We are ready to go, and we’ll have a great time today docking with the space station,” Doi said.
Doi did postdoctoral work and taught at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The flight also is carrying biomedical experiments from CU.
