The team at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center reports that there are no problems developing on the external tank foam and the ground umbilical carrier plate that leaked during last month’s countdown has sealed as it should thus far into the tanking test. The team did not expect immediate results today and the test will continue today as the data is collected.
Setting up for today’s tanking test required technicians to place 39 strain gauges and 50 temperature sensors on the outside of space shuttle Discovery’s external fuel tank. The sensors were basically focused on two areas of the tank, one where a pair of cracked stringers were repaired and one in a similar section of the tank where the stringers were not repaired. But the preparation did not stop there. Workers also had to run 162 wires, each 200 feet long, from the recording gear at the fixed service structure along an access arm to the shuttle and finally attaching to the individual sensors. And it was done during a severe cold snap here at the Florida spaceport.
"The biggest challenge was the weather," said Alicia Mendoza, NASA’s External Tank and Solid Rocket Booster vehicle manager at Kennedy.
The sensors are expected to gather at least 6 terabytes of data. For the sake of comparison, an average academic research library contains about 2 terabytes of information. So these sensors should return about as much information as three academic research libraries.