On Tue, 4 Feb 2003, Markus Mehring wrote: > Third, there is not really a point in taking such images, which would also > be why the idea reportedly was disregarded. You gain nothing in knowing > what kind of damage you have to the heat-shield, because there is > absolutely nothing you could do about it. You can't repair it on orbit, > that's simply not possible. Well, it could shorten the incident investigation after the mission. It'd have to be used discretely of course. > You also can't re-enter extra carefully, > because the re-entry profile and trajectory, as it is now, already is the > least stressful and most cautious profile you can fly. All you can do is > take your chance and ride it out. I agree with this statement. However, there is an option that exists but most certainly would not have helped in this case. They use the least stressful entry profile if you want the orbiter to be reuseable. However, if willing to sacrifice the orbiter, they could pull a Gagarrin. This capability was added after Challenger. But the breakup occurred early in the descent. Clearly they needed far more margin than this technique would be able to give. Richard Clark rclark@lpl.arizona.edu ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org http://www.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Feb 04 2003 - 16:45:33 EST