Engineers at NASA will now have a sigh of relief as space shuttle Atlantis has been finally launched after a three-month delay because of the hail damage.
The shuttle left Earth at 7:38 p.m. ET, Friday from the launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral. Less than 9 minutes after the launch the Shuttle reached orbit.
Atlantis commander Frederick Sturkow responded by thanking the shuttle team members “for their dedication and hard work.”
The shuttle was nearly delayed again as less than an hour before the scheduled launch time the weather was not good for launch at both of the shuttle’s emergency landing sites in Europe.
Weather forecasters had predicted fog and cloud cover along with showers. If this would have been the conditions then Atlantis would again have been grounded. But this time it seemed as luck was in favor of NASA and the weather was good by launch time.
NASA has already suffered quite a lot because of the delayed Atlantis launch. Atlantis was scheduled to be launched in mid-March, but was delayed for three months as heavy hailstorm struck the shuttle while it was on the launch pad. The golf ball sized hail dinged the shuttle’s outer fuel tank, forcing NASA engineers to take the shuttle to the hangar again for repairs. This delay also forced NASA to cancel a future shuttle mission scheduled for this year. The space agency will now be launching four shuttle missions instead of five in this year.
Atlantis is carrying a crew of seven astronauts including mission commander Rick Sturckow, pilot Lee Archambault and mission specialists Swanson, Patrick Forrester, Danny Olivas, James Reilly and Clayton Anderson. It is the first all-male crew at launch since 2002.
All the seven astronauts will spend most of their time doing construction work on the half done ISS. On Monday and Tuesday, the Atlantis crew plans to unload a new $367 million structural girder from their ship’s cargo hold and bolt it onto the station. During the 11-day mission, the crew will also help unfold vast solar panels that will provide power for new laboratories to be added to the station over the coming year.
Astronaut Sunita Williams who is aboard the space station will also be coming back aboard Atlantis as she has been in orbit for the last six months. She will be replaced by Clayton Anderson.
NASA will be retiring shuttle in mid-2010. There is no other machine with the space agency that can carry such heavy loads to the International Space Station. They are now looking to complete as much work of the space station before it retires. The space agency is looking forward to launch at least 12 construction missions besides this one to the space station. NASA is also planning to send a crew to repair the Hubble Space Telescope before 2010.
Via: usatoday
