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...part of the sky marked by the constellation Eridanus. That seemed odd, since radio galaxies tend to be spread about pretty evenly. Then they took a look at an entirely different set of data: microwaves emitted shortly after the Big Bang, as seen by the WMAP (or, NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotopy Probe) satellite. There was a "cold" spot in the microwaves right at the same place where there weren't enough radio galaxies...
With the gouge issue off the radar for now, NASA turned its attention to the next blip on the screen: Hurricane Dean, now pounding the islands of the Caribbean and drag-racing Endeavour toward the Gulf - right under the shuttle's landing-day flight path...
After a careful analysis of the risks, NASA is betting that the chances of catastrophe when the damaged space shuttle Endeavour returns to Earth on Aug. 22 are zero. If this were the NASA of old - the one that disastrously miscalculated the dangers of a leaky O-ring and a punctured heat shield to the Challenger and Columbia shuttles, respectively - you would surely have heard a round of protest from at least a few highly qualified aerospace engineers...
...making the decision Thursday night to fly Endeavour home as-is, skipping an untested-in-space repair job to the gouge on the shuttle's belly, NASA seems to have won the confidence of the whole shuttle engineering community. John Shannon, chairman of the Endeavour mission management team and the man who assessed the risk, made the call based on an abundance of testing and analysis over the past week, rather than from any rocket jockey arrogance, which was largely blamed for the last two shuttle losses. Among the 30 organizations from which scientists were called in for independent analyses...
...future of the space shuttle program, which impacts, among other things, the maintenance of the Hubble Telescope and the International Space Station, which can't survive without a space truck capable of delivering heavy construction loads. The investigation's thoroughness is also a direct result of an overhaul of NASA policies following the 2003 Columbia disaster. Asked whether the agency may have gone too far this time in information overload, Shannon, who never broke a sweat making his announcement in a press briefing, said no: "I love it. It's outstanding...