Sep 3 1999
From The Space Library
NASA announced its decision to ground the entire Space Shuttle fleet while technicians continued detailed inspections of the fleet's wiring. During the first month of inspections, following the discovery that faulty wiring had caused a short circuit during Columbia's 23 July launch, technicians had located dozens of nicked or exposed wires. Shuttle managers had decided to extend the inspections to allow technicians to examine additional parts of each Shuttle. Technicians had replaced damaged wiring, encased some wires in plastic tubing, added Teflon wrapping to others, and replaced some connectors, to protect the wiring systems against future damage. Manager of the Space Shuttle Program Ronald D. Dittemore explained that the wiring problems "appeared to have been caused by work-related mechanical damage"-from being rubbed or stepped on or from having "heavy objects set down on them." The age of the wiring, normal wear, or vibrations from Shuttle operations did not appear to have caused the damage.
NASA announced that its new orbiting SeaWinds radar instrument, flying aboard the QuikSCAT satellite, was successfully tracking Iceberg B 10A, which had broken off the Thwaites glacier of Antarctica in 1992, drifting into a shipping lane. Earlier in 1999, Iceberg B l 0A had disappeared when conventional methods of tracking sea-surface ice ships' radar, shipping reports, optical images from satellites, and microwave sensor data-were unable to track it. David G. Long of the SeaWinds science team at Utah's Brigham Young University remarked that, although "a ship was dispatched to the iceberg's last known position, we were unable to find it until we started receiving data from the SeaWinds instrument in July." During its first pass over Antarctica, SeaWinds had spotted the iceberg, and the National Ice Center in Suitland, Maryland, had confirmed that the iceberg was B 10A. Scientists had continued to track it as it moved through the Drake Passage and headed northeast between Tierra del Fuego, at the southern tip of South America, and the Antarctic Peninsula. At that time, the National Ice Center had issued an iceberg navigation warning to Argentina.
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