by Francis Temman
Cape Canaveral (AFP) January 31, 2000 - NASA officials will meet early Tuesday to decide whether a technical glitch merits scrubbing a planned launch of the space shuttle Endeavor.
"We plan to meet again at 2:30 a.m. (0730 GMT) with the management team to review the findings of the team, and at that point we will decide whether we will proceed with tanking," said Ron Dittemore, shuttle program manager.
The glitch came as stubbornly overcast skies, showers and low clouds forced NASA to postpone a planned launch Monday.
A new launch attempt has been set for 12:44 p.m. (1944 GMT) Tuesday, with a launch window of two hours and four minutes, as meteorologists forecast a 60 percent chance of favorable weather conditions.
The six-person crew, which includes four Americans, one Japanese and one German had climbed on board the craft in their orange space suits and had taken their seats before the scheduled launch was scrubbed.
Endeavor was to carry 14.5 tonnes of radar equipment for an 11-day mission focused on creating a high-resolution, three-dimensional map of the Earth's surface.
It would have been the 97th flight of a US space shuttle since the start of the program in 1981.
Shortly before the announcement, a computer glitch led officials to halt the countdown for more than one hour after receiving an erroneous response during a check of the system.
Pre-flight tests uncovered trouble with the enhanced master events controller (EMEC). There are two of the controllers on board, which signal the separation of the solid rocket boosters and the external tank during ascent.
Engineers then successfully tested the system and gave the green light for the launch, which had been scheduled for 12:47 p.m. (1747 GMT), only to have the weather thwart their efforts.
Still, "the EMEC unit has not been exonerated yet and they are going to troubleshoot it," said Lisa Malone, a spokeswoman for the Kennedy Space center.
"We have formed an engineer team that will work during the late hours this evening to isolate the cause of the erroneous response and to confirm that we have a good EMEC," Dittemore said.
For two days, the launch had seemed uncertain, after the unexpected discovery of a defective joint in the motor of another shuttle.
Routine inspections after December's flight of the space shuttle Discovery revealed that a circular metal joint on the interior of an engine fuel pump had come loose during launch and been damaged by turbine blades.
Before giving a green light for Monday's launch, flight officials wanted to make sure there was no sign of a similar problem aboard Endeavour, which there was not.
Previous Articles STS-99
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