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STS-124 day 1 highlights

The highlights from shuttle Discovery's launch day are packaged into this movie.

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Discovery rolls out

Discovery travels from the Vehicle Assembly Building to pad 39A in preparation for the STS-124 mission.

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STS-124: The programs

In advance of shuttle Discovery's STS-124 mission to the station, managers from both programs discuss the flight.

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STS-124: The mission

A detailed preview of Discovery's mission to deliver Japan's science laboratory Kibo to the station is provided in this briefing.

 Part 1 | Part 2

STS-124: Spacewalks

Three spacewalks are planned during Discovery's STS-124 assembly mission to the station.

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STS-124: The Crew

The Discovery astronauts, led by commander Mark Kelly, meet the press in the traditional pre-flight news conference.

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Debris may be one of three insulation clips from rudder
BY WILLIAM HARWOOD
STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS "SPACE PLACE" & USED WITH PERMISSION
Posted: June 13, 2008

Engineers at the Johnson Space Center in Houston suspect a flashing bit of debris spotted floating away from the shuttle Discovery this morning may have been one of three clips used to secure thermal insulation in the ship's rudder/speed brake. A lost clip would pose no threat to a safe re-entry, NASA officials say, but engineers are still assessing photos of the debris to confirm its identity.


Credit: NASA TV
 
Commander Mark Kelly reported the debris around 7:35 a.m., just after he and pilot Ken Ham finished a normal day-before-entry test of the shuttle's control systems. The big rudder in the shuttle's vertical tail fin, which can split open to act as a speed brake during approach to the runway, was moved from side to side about five times during the tests.

"We observed an object depart aft of the starboard wing," Kelly said. "Looked like, and obviously it's hard to tell dimensions and size looking out the aft windows, but it looked like it might have been a foot to a foot and a half in width. And we've got a pretty reasonable image of it."

A few minutes later, the crew reported seeing a small protrusion where two sections of the rudder/speed brake come together. They downlinked a short video clip of the debris, along with still pictures shot with a digital camera, and offered to power up Discovery's robot arm for a closer look at the rudder.

Flight controllers told the astronauts to sit tight and a few hours later, astronaut Terry Virts in mission control told Kelly that engineers believe the debris might have been a clip used to hold a thermal barrier in place in the rudder/speed brake.

"The partial story, right now, it's looking like it's a clip," Virts said. "We have looked at ground pictures and corroborated that with the pictures you took, and they look pretty similar. And it's a clip that comes from the area inside the rudder/speed brake, you know, where the two sides come together. Just a metallic clip back there. So we think that's what it is. ... We are still analyzing it, we can't definitively say that yet, but that's the direction we're leaning."

That section of the vertical tail fin is not subjected to extreme re-entry heating and NASA mission control commentator Rob Navias said if the debris was, in fact, one of the clips, it would not "pose any concern for the return of the astronauts to the Kennedy Space Center tomorrow."

CBS News will interview the astronauts at 11:52 a.m. and entry flight director Richard Jones is scheduled to hold a standard pre-landing news briefing at 2 p.m.

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