Mission Managers Will Announce No Earlier Than November 22nd

NASA managers will hold a news conference no earlier than 1800 EST on Monday, Nov. 22, at the agency's Johnson Space Center in Houston to discuss the next space shuttle mission, STS-133, which was delayed on Nov. 5.

NASA officials will announce the status of repairs to a leaking hydrogen system that caused the initial delay. They also will discuss the cracks on the tops of two, 21-foot-long support beams, called stringers, on the exterior of the shuttle's external fuel tank in an area known as the intertank. The next launch window for space shuttle Discovery and six NASA astronauts begins Nov. 30.

Technicians worked Tuesday on the installation of new quick disconnect hardware in the recently-installed ground umbilical carrier plate (GUCP) to fix a hydrogen gas leak that scrubbed space shuttle Discovery's launch Nov. 5. Technicians installed a new flight seal in the GUCP attached to Discovery's external fuel tank last Friday night and spent the weekend taking precise measurements of the hardware to ensure all components are properly aligned and prevent another hydrogen leak.

Another team of technicians is working on repairing cracks on the tops of two, 21-foot-long support beams, called stringers, on the exterior of the external tank in an area known as the intertank. The team includes personnel from the external tank manufacturing plant in Louisiana, the Michoud Assembly Facility.

Over the weekend, technicians removed a section of one of the stringers that had two, 9-inch cracks in it. Last Friday, during foam removal and inspection of adjacent stringers to the one with the 9-inch cracks, technicians identified a crack about 3-inches long on the left-hand adjacent stringer. Further foam removal revealed one additional corresponding crack on the same left-hand adjacent stringer. Technicians plan to remove that section of the stringer Monday night. They'll also install a new section of metal, called a doubler because it's twice as thick as the original stringer metal, on the stringer that had the 9-inch cracks.

Engineers continue evaluating the intertank for any potential issues, but so far no other cracks have been found beyond the ones on the two previously identified stringers. There are a total of 108 stringers on the intertank.

FMI: www.nasa.gov