Discovery Crew Inspects Shuttle for Damage

HOUSTON, July 5 -- The crew of space shuttle Discovery spent its first full day in orbit Wednesday getting the spacecraft ready for docking with the international space station and conducting a painstaking laser survey of its heat shielding to check for launch damage.

Rendezvous with the station Thursday morning will culminate in a "rotational pitch maneuver" scheduled for 9:52 Eastern time, in which shuttle Mission Commander Steven W. Lindsey will slowly back flip Discovery so that the space station crew can take pictures of the orbiter's underbelly to see if the heat shielding was damaged during launch.

Early analysis after Tuesday's liftoff suggested that Discovery had apparently made it into orbit without mishap, and shuttle Mission Management Team leader John Shannon told reporters at Houston's Johnson Space Center that subsequent study showed that the modifications made to the external fuel tank during the past year "worked really well."

He said that eliminating a ridge of foam used as a windbreak on the tank had no ill effects on the pressure lines and cables it was designed to protect during launch, while brackets holding these conduits in place emerged almost unscathed, with the loss of only one tiny piece of foam.

He said Wednesday's scan for damage detected a protruding shim in the thermal tile that covers the bottom of the orbiter, but that this "gap filler" under the port wing poses no danger for reentry, unlike the two that were removed in a spacewalk during a shuttle flight last year.

Still, Shannon cautioned that NASA engineers "still don't have a tremendous amount of data" and will be gathering information for the next several days from launch data and inspections in space.

The first on-orbit step was Wednesday's detailed laser and video survey of the highly heat-resistant but brittle "reinforced carbon-carbon" on the leading edges of Discovery's wings and nose cone.

The RCC has been a prime safety focus of the shuttle program since a suitcase-size piece of tank foam breached space shuttle Columbia's port wing in 2003, causing the orbiter to disintegrate over Texas during its reentry.

Using a 100-foot boom outfitted with sophisticated cameras, astronauts spent more than six hours scanning Discovery. Shuttle Flight Director Tony Ceccacci told a Johnson Space Center news conference that the survey itself took only about 70 minutes, but that astronauts needed hours to unlimber the 100-foot boom and move it without bumping the shielding.

The only oddity was a white blotch encountered on the leading edge of the shuttle's right wing. Ceccacci said it appeared to be the same smear of bird droppings he had seen during a recent examination of Discovery on the Kennedy Space Center launchpad.

"We made sure the imagery guys had it in their database -- starboard wing RCC panels 18 and 19 -- and that's exactly where we saw it in the data today," Ceccacci said, grinning.

Discovery and its crew of seven will spend 12, or possibly 13, days in space, most of the time replenishing the station, repairing station machinery and testing shuttle equipment.

They will also transfer European Space Agency astronaut Thomas Reiter to the station for a six-month stay. He will join station Commander Pavel Vinogradov and Flight Engineer Jeffrey Williams, restoring the station crew to its normal pre-Columbia complement.