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Heat shield sealant 'behaves well,' astronauts say BY WILLIAM HARWOOD STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS "SPACE PLACE" & USED WITH PERMISSION Posted: July 12, 2006 Astronauts Piers Sellers and Mike Fossum are wrapping up their simulated heat shield repair work, touching up and smoothing out an experimental sealant they've spread over deliberately cracked and damaged panels of wing leading edge material. "The best practice for this is to have an old house in Houston," Sellers said as he used a putty knife to smooth the NOAX sealant. "Done that," laughed Fossum. "Yep, renovating an old house, that would do it," shuttle pilot Mark Kelly agreed from Discovery's flight deck. Working at a pallet mounted in the back of the shuttle's cargo bay, Sellers and Fossum troweled on NOAX and "worked it" with spatulas to get suspended air bubbles out. The material is very sensitive to temperature changes, hardly bubbling when the shuttle is in orbital darkness and then outgassing in direct sunlight. "On the whole, the material's behaving very well. You agree, Mike?" "Yeah," Fossum said. "Looks kind of like thick peanut butter now?" Kelly asked. "Yeah. It's tearing now a little bit. But it's OK," Sellers said. A few minutes later, Sellers reported he had lost one of his applicator spatulas. "Guys, I've got to tell you, I think my spatula's escaped," he said. "I don't see it on me." "OK, we'll take a look," Kelly said. "Is it caught on me anywhere? "No, it's not on those hooks," Fossum said. "Man, it escaped, how 'bout that?" A few minutes later, he added "I think it's gone, gone, gone." The spacewalkers currently are finishing up a final two samples. They then plan to use an experimental infrared camera to photograph the samples, two in sunlight and two in shadow, to test the camera's ability to spot damage in reinforced carbon carbon panels. After that, they'll clean up the payload bay and return to the space station's Quest airlock module.
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