Discovery roared into orbit Tuesday in NASA’s first shuttle flight since the 2003 Columbia disaster, and afterward engineers began evaluating pictures of falling debris to determine the chances of another mishap.
A new battery of cameras trained on the shuttle during launch showed a small piece of debris falling from the underside of the orbiter, which NASA officials say could have come from a tile near a door covering the nose landing gear.
But NASA’s flight operations manager, John Shannon, said it was too soon to determine the source of the debris, how large any possible defect might be and whether it poses any safety threat for the spacecraft.
“We did not come into this flight expecting to eliminate” all falling debris, he said at an evening news briefing at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. “But we knew that we had the tools available to us to characterize it.”
Best wishes and best speed to the crew of Discovery.
Blogs of War‘s John Little, a former NASA employee, has the best collection of links I’ve seen of the launch and the mission.