the shuttle Discovery will mark the return of America into space today you can watch NASA TV here and see the launch live! expected launch is at 3:51 eastern time Good Luck to the crew
Yes MM...I heard the weather in FLA is too crappy to launch. I did the NASA tour on Monday and they had a whole lot of stuff on the Return to Flight.
yeah I see that now, I had been watching the astronauts suit up and get loaded into their places, not I see the reverse happening
Scrubbed. Planned 24 hour turnaround. Hope we go tomorrow... Ecosensor in the tank failed. More details later...
They are saying now that it was a sensor that monitors fuel capacity, in one of the tanks. It was reading low even though the tank was full. The sensors help determine when engines shutdown and if it shutdown prematurely or did not shut down when the tank was empty it could have "catastrophic results" according to NASA. The other word is that it is not an easy fix and the delay may be for several days. It has apparantly been said that a thursday launch is definitely out of the question.
These are the ECO (Engine CutOff) sensors. They read the fuel as either DRY or WET. At DRY, the Engines are auto-cutoff. Could be bad sensors, could be bad wires/plugs, or it could be a bad logic box that sits in the aft compartment of the Orbiter. Interestingly, this was the same problem they had before rolling back with the old 114 tank.
It'd be cool and all to be an astronaut and go to space...but it seems like the risk of dying is significantly higher than, well, a lot of things.
Yeah, my post wasn't meant as a disagreement with what you had said earlier, just filling in some of the info. I also saw the stuff about them actually being backup tanks because of a similar problem with the originals. At the point when they switched to the backup tanks NASA also made the decision not to run tests on them but to test them on the launchpad.
My mother works at NASA and she says the flight has been rescheduled for Monday and if they miss that window that it might be put off until September.
Looks like things are good to go for a 9:39 am launch. You can watch it live on the net courtesy of NASA TV. http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html
