Over the weekend at Launch Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, technicians took additional measurements to ensure the best possible alignment of the newly installed ground umbilical carrier plate, or GUCP, on space shuttle Discovery’s external fuel tank. Teams installed the flight seal Friday night and will meet today to evaluate data. Technicians expect to begin installing the quick disconnects today.
Engineers also are continuing work to repair cracks in Discovery’s external tank intertank section. During foam removal and inspection of adjacent stringers to the one with two 9-inch cracks, technicians identified a crack about 3-inches long on the left-hand adjacent stringer. This was not an unexpected result since the load was most likely transferred to the adjacent stringer when both sides of the original stringer cracked during tanking operations for Discovery’s scrubbed launch attempt on Nov. 5. Teams will build and use existing structural math models to understand the loading at the interface. Stringers are aluminum support strips on the outside of the external tank that form the section between the inside liquid oxygen tank and the liquid hydrogen tanks.