Engineers Count More Than 100 Dings On Orbiter -- That's About
Average
As the STS-114 astronauts were getting a big "welcome home!" at
the Johnson Space Center in Houston, TX, engineers in the Mojave
Desert were counting the dents and dings on Discovery. It's not
that there were any more than usual -- 101, 20 of which measured
more than an inch in either length or diameter -- it's just that,
in the wake of the Columbia tragedy, everybody's counting.