ATLANTIS CREW AVERTS EMERGENCY TOUCHDOWN.Byline: Marcia Dunn Associated Press Associated Press: see news agency. Associated Press (AP) Cooperative news agency, the oldest and largest in the U.S. and long the largest in the world. Space shuttle space shuttle, reusable U.S. space vehicle. Developed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), it consists of a winged orbiter, two solid-rocket boosters, and an external tank. Atlantis almost had to make an emergency landing Saturday when its huge cargo-bay doors would not open in orbit and allow heat to radiate ra·di·ate v. 1. To spread out in all directions from a center. 2. To emit or be emitted as radiation. ra from the shuttle. Flight director Jeff Bantle said 10 more minutes and he would have ordered Atlantis and its five-person crew to return to Earth - fast. However, the two doors finally swung open, and the shuttle was able to remain safely in orbit for one more day. ``Everybody sighed very loudly Adv. 1. very loudly - a direction in music; to be played very loudly fortissimo ,'' Bantle said about the mood at Mission Control in Houston. ``Nervous? Yeah. Tense? Yes. Everybody knew the constraints we had and the options we had.'' NASA NASA: see National Aeronautics and Space Administration. NASA in full National Aeronautics and Space Administration Independent U.S. had tried to bring Atlantis down twice Saturday but both landings were postponed because of cloudy skies over the Kennedy Space Center Kennedy Space Center (Cape Canaveral) U.S. launch site for manned space missions. [U.S. Hist.: WB, So:562] See : Astronautics in Florida. The mission, during which astronaut Shannon Lucid Shannon Matilda Wells Lucid (born January 14, 1943) is an American astronaut who previously held the record for the longest duration stay in space by a woman. She has flown in space five times including a prolonged mission aboard the Mir space station. was left on the Russian space station Mir for a five-month stay, already had been troubled by a leaky steering system that forced NASA to cut short the flight by a day. The crisis with the cargo doors began shortly after NASA passed on the landing attempts at Kennedy. Within minutes, the astronauts began reversing their landing procedures, which required reopening the 60-foot cargo-bay doors. The doors must be open while the shuttle is in orbit to allow radiators in the cargo bay to dispel heat collected from shuttle electronics and other equipment. They are closed several hours prior to landing. Had the cargo-bay doors remained shut, Bantle said, Atlantis could have stayed in orbit for only four more hours before the heat would have begun damaging the shuttle's electrical systems. The process of opening the doors was halted when two switches indicated that four of the 16 center-line door latches had not opened. Mission Control ordered the astronauts to look out their windows to see if they could tell whether the latches were indeed closed. Flight controllers eventually traced the problem to two frozen, malfunctioning microswitches. Such a dual failure had never happened before. |
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