NASA hit by series of shuttle mishaps

Cape Canaveral, Fla., Mar 10: Workers bumped the space shuttle Discovery's robot arm in one of three recent mishaps at the Kennedy Space Center that experts hope caused only minor damage, NASA officials said.

The 50-foot arm, a hinged crane in Discovery's payload bay, is critical to the ship's upcoming mission to test safety upgrades implemented after the fatal 2003 Columbia accident and to deliver supplies to the International Space Station.

Experts arrived yesterday to assess damage. Kennedy Space Center spokeswoman Jessica Rye said managers were investigating the cause of the accidents.

NASA hopes to launch its next shuttle in May, after trying to resolve problems with the external fuel tank that allowed insulation foam to fall off during last July's flawed space mission by Discovery. It was falling foam that doomed Columbia.

Discovery's mechanical arm was bumped last week by a cherry picker-style work bucket as technicians attempted to clean up glass shards that had fallen into the cargo bay from a broken work light. The broken light was the result of another worker's misstep.

''He was looking at tile repair and accidentally broke the lamp,'' said NASA spokeswoman Katherine Trinidad.

Another investigation was under way to assess tile damage to the shuttle Endeavour from an unrelated accident on Tuesday.

A radiation meter and a film processor fell off a tray holding equipment that a technician planned to use to inspect Endeavour's rudder speed brake.

The instruments hit a shuttle body flap covered with the delicate ceramic tiles that protect the shuttle from heat during its plunge through Earth's atmosphere prior to landing.

Damage to the heat shield by falling foam led to the loss of Columbia and the deaths of its seven-member crew in 2003.

Structural inspections of the damaged area were under way, Rye said.

NASA's shuttle flights have been on hold since Discovery's mission last summer.

Reuters