By DPA
Washington : Hurricane Dean may force NASA to cut short by one day the mission of the space shuttle Endeavour, space agency officials said Saturday.
With astronauts on the shuttle preparing for their fourth and final space walk later Saturday, officials were keeping a wary eye on the path of hurricane Dean and the possibility that the flight control centre in Houston, Texas might have to be evacuated.
The Endeavour is scheduled to undock from the International Space Station (ISS) Monday and land at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida Wednesday.
But now NASA was exploring the possibility that the shuttle would have to land a day sooner, on Tuesday, officials said.
In a precautionary move, mission officials ordered that the final space walk would be cut short by two hours in order to provide more time for the shuttle crew to start preparing for an earlier landing.
The last space walk would come after NASA decided against repairing damage the shuttle sustained during takeoff.
Astronaut Dave Williams and space station flight engineer Clay Anderson are to conduct Saturday’s space walk during which they were to install and remove antennas on the outside of the ISS and conduct other construction projects during Saturday’s sojourn outside the spacecraft.
Commander Scott Kelly said Friday in a news conference from space that the crew agreed with the decision reached by NASA late Thursday not to repair a gash in the underside of the shuttle.
NASA had been considering a repair for most of the week, before deciding that the repair was not necessary and the damage posed no threat to the astronauts’ safety. Kelly said the crew was concerned that a repair could have dealt more damage to the orbiter.
The damage was judged to be not serious enough to risk a catastrophic failure of the shuttle’s heat shield, like the one that destroyed the shuttle Columbia on re-entry in February 2002, NASA officials said.
The process of underside repairs during a space walk would have entailed risks for the astronauts during the process.