Today at 4.14 am EST endeavour was launched into space. 5th and 12th lord Mars is seen debilitated and in the Ascendant Rahu is placed . 9th house  lord  and 10th lord is badly inlfuenced by evil Mars in 8th house. 9th lord is also with Bhadakastandipathi. Will this going to be troublesome ?  Pray lord that this flight is not going to be yet another Columbia. Will there be a propellant leak, or Machincal failure or Amonia or other chemical leak which is going to be cause of concern? Let us keep our fingures crossed till the shuttle return to land

Cameras on the orbiter's solid-rocket motors captured two or three instances of foam loss during Monday's ascent, mission managers said at a post-launch briefing. A quick initial analysis suggested no damage to the orbiter. Tuesday’s inspection, which uses sensors on the end of a special extension to the shuttle's robotic arm, will give engineers the more-detailed information they need to determine whether the shuttle's tiles sustained any damage

from Aviation week

Leroy Cain, chairman of the Mission Management Team (MMT), said it will be another day before a decision is made on doing a focused inspection of any potential damage on the tiles or the reinforced carbon-carbon panels that protect the wing leading edges and nose of the orbiter.

Going into that decision, the MMT had only a couple of small matters to discuss on Tuesday afternoon. The most alarming — to the naked eye, at least — was a protruding inconel seal sticking up from an access panel on the aft area of the orbiter’s left wing. Cain said about three inches of the seal, which allows air behind a “flipper door” to the hinges and actuators for the wing’s elevons, is protruding. However, it lies within the wing’s “aerodynamic shadow,” and is probably too small to be of concern

“This seal protruding like this is not going to pose any issue for us, either structurally for wing or from a thermal dynamics standpoint,” Cain said during a post-MMT press briefing Tuesday.

The issue will get additional analysis before it is cleared, however. Also on the agenda for JSC engineers are a few impact readings from accelerometers behind the wing leading edges. Cain said there were impacts at about two minutes into ascent, shortly before main engine cutoff at about eight minutes, and again after Endeavour reached orbit.

The underlying concern driving all of the inspection and analysis is a repeat of the type of thermal protection system damage that destroyed the shuttle Columbia on reentry seven years ago this month. Since then, Cain said, analysts have become much more proficient at going through the data and reaching their conclusions fairly quickly, based on lessons learned from earlier missions

The space shuttle Endeavour's heat shield is in fine shape despite three minor defects, which pose no risk to the orbiter or its six-astronaut crew, a top NASA official said Friday.

Deputy space shuttle program manager LeRoy Cain said engineers have cleared Endeavour for its planned re-entry and landing late next week after settling concerns over two protruding bits and a cracked thermal tile.

Images of Endeavour before it arrived at the International Space Station this week revealed a small ceramic insert jutting up from just below a cockpit window. A small crack in a white heat-resistant tile on the cockpit's roof also had reappeared and part of a small seal on the shuttle's left wing had peeled up.


None of the items posed a major safety concern, and all are too small to cause any damage to Endeavour if they rip off under the searing heat of re-entry, said Cain, who leads Endeavour's mission management team.

Cain told reporters that NASA engineers had "reviewed all of that data and we determined that the vehicle is cleared for safe deorbit, re-entry and landing."

NASA has kept a close watch on shuttle heat shield health since a piece of debris led to the destruction of the shuttle Columbia during re-entry in 2003. A final, standard inspection of Endeavour's heat shield will be conducted by shuttle astronauts once the orbiter leaves the station next week.

Tranquility in space
With Endeavour's heat shield in the clear, all 11 astronauts aboard the linked shuttle and space station can focus on opening the orbiting laboratory's brand-new room and fixing a finicky spacesuit fan for a late Saturday spacewalk.

The new space room, called Tranquility in honor of the Apollo 11 landing site, was attached to the station during an overnight spacewalk that began late Thursday.

The module is nearly 24 feet (7 meters) long and about the size of a small bus. The plumbing lines for its main cooling system haven't been hooked up yet, so astronauts can't switch on all of its systems. But they can open the hatch to the module and begin outfitting it for use on the space station.

That grand opening is slated to take place at 9:14 p.m. ET.

"Today we ingress the new module and get it up and running. Great to have everybody on board!" station commander Jeffrey Williams wrote in a Twitter update. He leads the station's five-man crew.

The astronauts are expected to open Tranquility's door and move an exercise machine that looks like a bench press inside the module as one of their main tasks. They will have to use hand-held flashlights since the module's main systems aren't yet online.

Tranquility was delivered with a seven-window observation deck that includes a huge round central window, is the largest ever sent to space.  Those windows are closed tight and covered by protective shutters, but will be opened next week once the observation dome is moved to its final, Earth-facing location.

The two additions cost nearly $409 million and were built in Italy for NASA by the European Space Agency. Their arrival has brought the $100 billion space station up to 98 percent complete, but three spacewalks are required to fully install them.

The spacesuit glitch, the second for Endeavour's two-man spacewalking team, will require astronaut Nicholas Patrick to fix a malfunctioning fan inside his suit. He may replace the small parts or use a different suit entirely, but only after the power harness on that spare can be repaired, mission managers said.

NASA studying two problems on space shuttle
A ceramic spacer is sticking out, and a thermal tile repair has failed