Word: ship
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...program has already touched many parts of the globe: The radar's prototype was built in the Marshall Islands; its semi-submersible converted oil rig platform was designed in Norway. The two parts were assembled in Texas, its 50,000 tons hoisted onto a ship, and sailed 15,000 miles around the tip of South America (it was too big to use the Panama Canal), arriving in Pearl Harbor in January 2006. Its ultimate destination is the more challenging waters of Adak, a farflung outpost in Alaska's Aleutian island chain, famous for terrible weather and 100-foot waves...
...standard for judging what constitutes a safe return home: any landing you can walk away from, they say, is a good one. All the current handwringing about the gouge on the belly of the space shuttle Endeavour notwithstanding, the odds are extremely high that the seven astronauts aboard the ship will indeed walk away when their mission ends 10 days from now. That doesn't mean that there won't be plenty of knotted stomachs in Mission Control and the homes of the crewmembers until then - and with good reason...
Fifty-eight seconds after launch, a fragment of ice or insulating foam once again broke away from the shuttle's external fuel tank and - once again - left a deep divot in the ship's insulating tiles. It was foam damage that killed the shuttle Columbia in February 2003, when superheated gases generated during reentry entered the ship through a breach in the insulation. Ever since then, astronauts have given their spacecraft a close visual inspection upon reaching orbit to look for any troublesome chips. On Sunday, a 3D laser imager attached to Endeavour's robotic arm revealed what could...
Measuring about 3.5 in. long and located near the ship's right wheel well, the breach goes all the way through the inch-thick, heat-resistant ceramic, down to the fabric insulation below. It cuts across at least two tiles and perhaps a third. There is nothing at all good about that kind of break. The wheel well is a particularly vulnerable spot, since damage there can provide easy access to the fragile innards of the ship. It was Columbia's left wheel well that first showed signs of overheating in the lead-up to the fatal accident, as searing...
...wheel well grows blistering during reentry - on the order of 2,300 degrees Fahrenheit - that's a fair bit cooler than the 3,000 degrees reached at the spacecraft's nose and wingtips. Even damaged tiles can usually survive the heating at the aft end of the ship. NASA reports that it caught one bit of good luck in that the breach occurred right over a stretch of the aluminum framework of the ship itself - a bit like damaging a sheet-rock wall directly over one of the wooden beams that holds the wall up, as opposed to the unsupported...