a blog…

Birthday present from NASA

July 21, 2005 on 2:08 pm | In Blah Blah |

On the day of my 25th birthday, presumably as a present to me, NASA decided to launch the Discovery Shuttle. While I am very happy for such a wonderful present, I read something in their report that didn’t make much sense: “Shuttle engineers investigating the anomaly believe that electromagnetic interference from existing or new hardware, such as additional cameras or heaters attached to the bipod fitting that connects Discovery to its external tank, and a small grounding issue with sensor wiring may be the culprit.” From space.com.

So what is it, a grounding problem or EM interference? I looked at some of the diagrams (http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/122488main_ECO_sensors.jpg) and it looks like it is shielded pretty well inside the tank… so how is EM messing with it? And why is it only messing with one of four sensors? Much more likely is the grounding problem, but I can’t find much details about it…

Good luck to NASA!