Pingie: HTTP:: Discovery Takes Off Tomorrow

HTTP:: Discovery Takes Off Tomorrow
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Late on Sunday, officials at the US space agency NASA cleared the space shuttle Discovery for launch on the STS-128 assembly mission to the International Space Station. The flight is scheduled to begin at 1:36 am EDT (0536 GMT), from Launch Pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC), in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The shuttle has an 80-percent chance of good weather during take-off, an increase from the 70 percent recorded on Saturday. Discovery's flight will last 13 days, Space reports. Mission controllers have been concerned with the foam insulation on the shuttle's external tank over the past couple of weeks. In previous flights, such as the one conducted by shuttle Atlantis to the Hubble Space Telescope, and shuttle Endeavor to the ISS, large pieces of the stuff broke off and fell on the shuttles, fortunately without any major damage to their heat shields. However, officials were not about to take that chance again. Using high-power X-rays and other observation tools, NA!
SA engineers spent many hours on the fuel tank, closely analyzing the foam layer. They determined that it posed no dangers to Discovery. The experts couldn't find anything wrong with it, not even defects as small as micro-cracks. “We are go for launch,” the Head of Discovery's mission management team, Mike Moses, said Sunday night. The spacec...
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