Discovery's external fuel tank, the first one built from scratch with all of the post-Columbia safety changes, performed well based on preliminary examinations, NASA officials said Sunday.
The new tank was designed to release as little falling debris as possible during launch, since falling foam carved a hole in Columbia's wing in 2003 at liftoff and led to the shuttle's demise during re-entry.
"We worked very hard on the modifications that were in place," LeRoy Cain, chairman of the mission management team, said in a briefing at Johnson Space Center in Florida on Sunday. "We feel very good about the performance of the tank."
The astronauts on Sunday performed a limited inspection of the ship's wings using a camera on the end of the shuttle's 50-foot robot arm.
The arm is only long enough for the crew to take images of the upper surfaces of the wings' leading edges. A more thorough inspection is planned for later in the mission.
About five pieces of foam debris were seen to fall from the external tank during Discovery's launch. Mission managers say they don't think these were likely to have damaged the orbiter because they appeared to be lightweight and they fell relatively late during the liftoff, so they wouldn't have built up enough velocity to pose a great threat.
"We don't consider those a big deal to us," space flight chief Bill Gerstenmaier said Saturday after the liftoff.
NASA spent more than 1 billion U.S. dollars and two years fixing the tank to minimize debris and added a suite of inspection tools to check for damage after launch. Because of the shuttle's design, NASA says it will never completely solve the debris issue but it does expect any fly-away foam will be too small and occur too late during the climb to orbit to do any damage.
Source:Xinhua/Agencies
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