Word: nasa
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...sound of twin sonic booms just after 8 a.m. ET never sounded so good to NASA, signalling re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere after the craft and its heat shield tiles survived the hottest part of the descent at some 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. "We're happy to be home," Discovery commander Eileen Collins transmitted to NASA from the Edwards runway. NASA was happy too-although everyone would have been even happier had they landed in Florida, as scheduled. Unfortunately, cloud cover and lightning forced the landing in California...
...NASA extended the mission one day in the hopes of landing in Florida. Now the shuttle must be transported back to Florida where it will be ready as Atlantis's backup for a mission tentatively scheduled for September. Had Discovery touched down in Florida, of course, it would have been easier to stick to their time-table. Before that next mission, NASA must continue to answer questions about foam debris. The growing consensus, however, is that personnel walking on the craft during preparations may have accidentally dented the external fuel tank, leading to the dislodged foam. In other words, NASA...
...least loss of foam when compared to the other shuttle launches. Still, the first-ever space walk to the underside of the shuttle was deemed necessary to pull cloth from between tiles, again to err on the side of caution. And despite the smaller amount of foam debris hits, NASA admits that the largest chunk to fall could have been equally disastrous had it hit the shuttle's wing or a heat-shielding tile elsewhere on the craft...
...NASA has already announced it will not fly another shuttle until it can ensure even greater safety, and it will tout any next shuttle mission as one more apt to capture the imagination of the public that space flight has been known for. The Discovery flight was to retrieve two tons of garbage from a space station many often forget even exists. Now, NASA must ensure it can continue to secure the existing shuttle's foam coverage if it wants to continue flights through its planned 2010 retirement; it must also design a new manned orbitor and complete the space...
...next 2,000 years--first in Egypt and then for the past 80 years or so in the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum in San Jose, Calif. But for several months, the girl--who has been nicknamed Sherit, an ancient Egyptian word meaning "little one"--has been visiting the Stanford-NASA National Biocomputation Center in nearby Palo Alto. There, doctors and other scientists, working with imaging experts from Silicon Graphics, have been unwrapping her--not physically, which would cause enormous damage, but virtually. Using more than 60,000 high-resolution X-ray images from scans that produce 35 times as much information...