Shuttle’s Tiles Take Beating but No Delay in Next Mission Is Seen

As many as 175 heat-resistant tiles on the shuttle orbiter Atlantis were badly damaged during the classified mission that concluded Tuesday and will have to be replaced, but that will not delay the orbiter’s next mission, NASA spokeswoman Lisa Malone said Wednesday.

That is about double the number of tiles that were damaged during the Discovery mission two months earlier.

The tiles, which shield the orbiter from heat during its fiery plunge into the atmosphere, were deeply pitted and gouged during takeoff and one tile was completely knocked off, Malone said. The five Atlantis astronauts used the orbiter’s robot arm to inspect the damage during the flight and concluded that the tiles would not cause problems during re-entry, NASA officials said.

Satellite Launching

Atlantis landed Tuesday at Edwards Air Force Base at 3:36 p.m. after a four-day mission in which the crew is believed to have launched a $500-million radar-imaging satellite that will be used to spy on the Soviet Union.

A post-flight inspection showed no heat damage in the area of the missing tile, Malone said. On Wednesday, NASA crews at Edwards were servicing Atlantis and preparing to bolt it piggyback onto a Boeing 747 jumbo jet for a two-day flight back to Cape Canaveral in Florida beginning Sunday, with a stop at Kelly Air Force Base in San Antonio.

The repair of the tiles is not expected to delay Atlantis’ next mission, the April 28 launch of the Magellan spacecraft to Venus.

The five astronauts flew home to Houston on Tuesday night and took Wednesday off to be with their families before beginning a debriefing by officials from NASA and the Air Force, which sponsored the flight.

NASA officials have formed an assessment team to try to determine what caused the damage to the tiles. A preliminary viewing of videotapes of the Friday morning launch show an unknown object flying away from the right-hand side of the orbiter’s nose, where the damage was mostly localized, seconds after the orbiter separated from its two solid-rocket boosters.

The object may have been insulation from the shuttle’s external fuel tank or cork insulation from the right-side booster but “we’re not going to go out and speculate right now,” said Conrad Nagel, the engineer in charge of Atlantis’ launch processing.