NASA has added two days to the shuttle Atlantis' mission so that astronauts can repair a damaged thermal blanket on the vessel's exterior, the US space agency said late on Monday.
The decision to add a fourth space walk to the Atlantis crew's schedule to fix the thermal blanket would mean a mission of 13 days in space rather than the originally planned 11 days, said John Shannon, head of NASA's mission management team.
NASA does not think the inches-long tear in a thermal blanket near the tail poses a great danger to the shuttle, but deputy shuttle program manager John Shannon said mission managers were being cautious.
"It was 100 percent consensus that the unknowns in the engineering analysis and the potential damage ... was not acceptable and we wanted to go and fix it," he said in a briefing at Johnson Space Center.
NASA engineers have been eyeing the torn blanket since it was spotted shortly after Atlantis took off on Friday.
If not fixed, the tear could cause heat damage to the shuttle when it returns to Earth on its new landing day, June 21, Shannon said.
NASA has treated heat shield issues with great caution since Columbia disintegrated during its return home in 2003, killing the seven astronauts on board.
On Monday, Atlantis astronauts James Reilly and John "Danny" Olivas floated out of the space station's airlock at 4:08pm to begin the first of four spacewalks during the 13-day mission.
The shuttle reached the space station, a project involving 16 nations that is slightly more than halfway built, on Sunday after a two-day chase in Earth's orbit.
They spent much of the day installing on the station a 14m long, 16,183kg metal structure flown up by Atlantis. The US$367 million unit includes a pair of wing-like, electricity-generating solar panels scheduled to be unfurled yesterday.
A second spacewalk is slated today, when astronauts Pat Forrester and Steve Swanson will go out to retract an old solar panel.
Whether the blanket repair will occur on the third spacewalk on Friday or the additional fourth spacewalk had not been decided, mission operations representative Joe Montalbano said.
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