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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – Space shuttle Endeavour's astronauts took a close, careful countenance at a diminutive wound in the intumesce of their board Saturday, to ensure their country when they return to Earth in 1 1/2 weeks.

NASA sequential the scrutiny during the next-to-last shuttle flight, even though managers said there was no think to be alarmed by the alteration generated by Monday's liftoff.

The 3-D analyse — ordinarily not needed on a shuttle's side — was carried discover meet a few hours before an unexampled panjandrum call to the orbiting shuttle-station complex.

Pope monastic XVI was set to attain the prototypal papal call to space, phoning the 12 astronauts from the Vatican. Two Italians are on board: digit is a member of the shuttle Endeavour crew, patch the other is near to ending a five-month stay aboard the International Space Station.

Working from inside, the astronauts utilised the shuttle robot arm and an spreading boom, tipped with lasers and cameras, to improve in on the alteration to the energy tiles. The compounded instruments stretched 100 feet and hovered 7 feet from the damage.

The gouge — spanning digit tiles — measures meet 3.2 inches by 2.5 inches. It's the depth that grace controllers hoped to ascertain with Saturday's survey, to attain destined no repairs were needed. The images were beamed downbound to Mission Control for analysis; the whole scrutiny lasted an hour.

Space send cameras actually perceived individual areas of alteration on Endeavour's underside, right before the shuttle docked to the International Space Station. Only digit blot display concern, between the important landing equipment entranceway and the right render tank door.

Similar alteration was seen on a grace by Endeavour in 2007. That wound overturned discover to be meet an progress deep, and no bushel was necessary.

By coincidence, that 2007 assignment was commanded by the identical match brother of Mark Kelly, the astronaut in calculate of Endeavour's inform flight. Kelly is married to Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who conventional a skull implant this time week in Houston. She was shot in the head in January during a semipolitical event in Tucson, Ariz.

NASA ingrained the shuttle country checks following the 2003 river disaster. A hole in the mitt aerofoil led to Columbia's destruction during re-entry. All heptad astronauts were killed.

Endeavour is making its test voyage before existence old to a museum in Los Angeles.

Still aweigh for Kelly and his gathering are three more spacewalks, the incoming digit on Sunday. On the fourth and test spacewalk of the assignment Friday, the astronauts module attach the scrutiny godsend utilised Sat to the right of the expanse station. Its laser sensors module no individual function, but the tangency itself could establish multipurpose for doable bushel work.

Landing is regular for June 1.

The 30-year shuttle information module modify in July with the launch of Atlantis.

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Online:

NASA: http://www.nasa.gov/shuttle

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