NASA aims to make a second attempt early Friday to move shuttle Endeavour out to Kennedy Space Center's Launch Complex 39B, but agency managers will be keeping close tabs on a chance of rain and lightning in the area.
A thunderstorm brought lightning within 10 miles of KSC late Wednesday night, prompting NASA to call off an overnight move to the pad. First motion now is set for 12:01 a.m. Friday and we'll have live coverage here in The Flame Trench.
We aim to provide the latest still images from live video feeds in the Launch Complex 39 area throughout the seven-hour move, and we will webcast live NASA TV coverage beginning at 6:30 a.m. Friday.
The current forecast from the Air Force 45th Space Wing Weather Squadron at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station calls for partly cloudy skies with a 40 percent chance of rain and a 30 percent chance of lightning between midnight and 8 a.m. Friday.
You can check it out here: forecast0918.pdf.
Refresh this page for the latest still image (top left) from the local Air Force weather channel, which shows views from orbiting weather satellites as well as local radar used to spot storm development.
You'll also get the latest still images (top right) from a video feed that shows Atlantis on pad 39A.Click the NASA TV image at the righthand side of the page to launch our NASA TV viewer.
Launch managers and meteorologists will hold a weather briefing at 7:30 p.m. tonight, and it's possible that the Endeavour rollout could be moved up from a currently scheduled first motion at 12:01 a.m. Friday.
Managers were ready to move rollout up to 11 p.m. Wednesday, but the thunderstorm popped up too within 10 miles of the space center and that plan consequently was dashed.
Endeavour is scheduled to launch Nov. 12 on an International Space Station outfitting mission but will be on stand-by to fly a rescue mission should Atlantis sustain critical damage during its upcoming Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission.
NASA officials still are targeting Oct. 10 for the Atlantis launch, but the schedule between now and then leaves no room to deal with any technical problems or additional delays in launch preparations.
The delivery of the Atlantis payload to pad 39A was pushed back to Friday after a minor packing problem cropped up. Loose insulation was detected in protective packaging inside a carrier that houses new telescope batteries and a new wide-field planetary camera.
Seven astronauts plan to install two new instruments on Hubble and repair two others. New batteries and gyroscopes should extend the life of the observatory, which was launched in 1990, to 2013.
Led by veteran astronaut Scott Altman, the Atlantis crew still is scheduled to fly to KSC Sunday evening to take part in emergency training and a two-day practice countdown next week.
We'll have live coverage of an informal media Q&A with the crew at 8:30 a.m. next Tuesday.
A firm date for the Atlantis launch will be set at an executive-level flight readiness review now scheduled for Oct. 2 and Oct. 3 here at KSC.
Johnson Space Center will reopen Monday after a weeklong effort to recover from Hurricane Ike, which devastated several communities in the area near the center.
No comments:
Post a Comment