From a mission control standpoint, Cain said Discovery's flight will use the same rules and procedures in place for Columbia's launching with one major exception. NASA is finalizing activation of a new trans-Atlantic abort site in France that will replace Ben Guerir in Morocco.

While NASA will leave equipment at Ben Guerir for possible use in the future, security issues in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks could not be ignored. The new landing site, known as Istres-le-Tube, is located northwest of Marseilles and is one of the largest military air bases in Europe.

"We're real excited about it," Cain said. "It's a great opportunity for us and the French air force and the air traffic control folks in southeastern France have been very helpful."

But barring an engine failure or some other malfunction that might trigger a TAL abort, Collins and Kelly will carry out the same ascent procedures as Rick Husband's crew aboard Columbia. But major changes have been implemented on the ground to document foam shedding from Discovery's external tank and any possible damage to the orbiter.

Bob Page, the engineer at the Kennedy Space Center who leads NASA's launch photo team, said Discovery's launching will be documented in unprecedented detail using a mixture of high-speed film cameras, high-definition TV cameras and even airborne sensors using two NASA WB-57 jets.

NASA will use its two WB-57 jets to monitor the shuttle during launch and entry. Photo: NASA

The high-definition video cameras are a major improvement over the standard television cameras in place when Columbia took off. Those operated at just under 30 frames per second, limiting how precisely engineers could track the debris from the fuel tank. The new HDTV cameras will operate at 60 frames per second and provide four times the resolution, or clarity.

But because the shuttle rolls into a "heads down" orientation shortly after launch, putting the belly on the other side facing upward, ground cameras, no matter how good, still will not be able to see certain areas of the shuttle's underside. But any major debris strikes should be readily apparent.

"For tracking debris, for determining debris size, for determining debris velocity, for location of impact, for source location, for a lot of those things, I have much better data," Page said in a recent interview. "But what so far has been determined as a damage size that would be a threat to the vehicle, it is smaller than the resolution that I can work with at the time frames from 70 seconds out to SRB separation. The damage size that's a threat to the vehicle is a whole lot smaller than anything I can see."

That's where cameras aboard the shuttle will come into play. But if anything large breaks away, and certainly anything the size of Columbia's bipod ramp, Page's cameras will spot it, track it and help managers determine what damage it may have caused.

More than 50 high-speed film cameras mounted on the launch pad, running at 400 frames per second, will capture the initial seconds of flight from extreme close range. Three short-range tracking platforms around the perimeter of the pad, each one equipped with two film cameras and an HDTV camera, will capture imagery through the first 57 seconds of flight.

Six medium-range tracking platforms, each with film and HDTV cameras, will capture the view through the first 100 seconds and 10 long-range trackers, five of them north and five south of the shuttle's ground track, will cover the flight through the first 165 seconds, well after booster separation.

Because of the high frame rate, imagery from the HDTV cameras will be stored on hard drives. The engineering team that will analyze the footage will be able to access it across the agency from internal NASA web sites. The public will see normal-resolution television views from those tracking in realtime over NASA's satellite network. Within six to eight hours, Page hopes to deliver processed HDTV imagery to public affairs for broadcast.

Along with switching to HDTV, Page also bumped up the frame rate of the film cameras to provide better temporal resolution.

"You've got to look at both the spatial and the temporal. Let's start with the film," he said. "We ran 35-millimeter film before and we're running it now. So the pixel, or grain, count is the same. But we've increased the frame rate from 64 frames per second to 100. So we have 50 percent more data points to track a piece of debris. As you're tracking a piece of debris as it moves down the stack during ascent, we have 50 percent more number of points, number of frames, to pinpoint where it is in three dimensional space. So that's important.

"From the video side, we're going from 30 frames per second interlaced, where every other line is scanned, and we're now going to 60 frames per second progressive scan, and that means every single line is scanned. So we have a hundred percent more data points, plus we have four times the resolution. We can measure the size better, we can see it better."

The smallest piece of debris or damage detectable by the ground cameras at the moment of solid-fuel booster separation is 15 to 16 inches across. To improve those numbers, NASA has equipped its two WB-57 jets with nose-mounted HDTV cameras and infrared sensors. The planes will fly 15 miles to the north and south of the shuttle's ground track at an altitude of 60,000 feet some 40 miles off shore. At booster separation, they will be 15 miles below the shuttle on a line perpendicular to the orbiter's ground track.

Each HDTV camera in the nose of each jet will be hooked up to a telescope with a 4.2-meter focal length. The telescopes should be capable of detecting debris or damage sites as small as six inches across at booster separation.

Page said the planes have two additional benefits for NASA: They can provide full video coverage of a return-to-launch-site abort and they will be used during re-entry to image a shuttle's plasma trail during the region of peak re-entry heating using both visible light and infrared. But footage cannot be downlinked from the aircraft. It must be delivered to analysts after landing.

For Discovery's re-entry, one of the WB-57s will be stationed over the Pacific Ocean, below and west of the point where peak heating begins, while the other will be stationed over Mexico, east of the point where peak heating ends. A third aircraft will be used lower, near the landing site, to provide additional photo documentation.

The jets normally are based at Ellington Field near Houston. For launch, they will be stationed at Patrick Air Force Base just south of the Kennedy Space Center. Page says it will take about a day to process the on-board imagery.

The CAIB recommended that NASA include the operational status of its tracking cameras in the agency's launch commit criteria, the set of rules used to determine whether a countdown can proceed or not. Page said the status of long-range trackers will be included in a management poll during a 10-minute hold at the T-minus 20-minute mark. A final poll of short-range camera status will be conducted during a hold at T-minus nine minutes. But the cameras are not part of the formal launch constraint criteria because they do not directly affect flight safety.

No additional polling will be conducted after the T-minus nine-minute hold and any subsequent failures in the camera system will not stop a countdown. The high-speed launch pad cameras fire up at T-minus 10 seconds and Page said it would be more dangerous to abort a countdown at that point than it would be to continue without complete camera coverage.

"The LCC comes into play when you look at these cameras on the pad," he said. "Now I have a computer system that is controlling every single one of these. If I lose that computer system, I lose all of these views. So what I do is, I have an LCC down to T-minus nine minutes for the control system for these cameras, to make sure it is operating and it is stable. And then I can continue on from T-minus nine."

NASA is spending $40 million to upgrade the imaging system at the Kennedy Space Center and $9 million to modify the WB-57s. Through the end of the shuttle program, the agency expects to spend another $40 million on operations, pushing the total cost of the new system to nearly $90 million.

PREVIEW REPORT PART 4 --->