Two spacewalking astronauts were set to spend Monday replacing a broken space station gyroscope as NASA engineers worked feverishly to decide whether Endeavour's crew would have to perform risky repairs to a gouge on the ship's belly later this week. A chunk of insulating foam smacked the shuttle at liftoff last week, creating a 3 1/2-inch-long (9-centimeter-long) gouge that penetrates all the way through the thermal shielding on the shuttle's belly. Teacher-turned-astronaut Barbara Morgan and other crew members spent much of Sunday using a laser boom attached to the shuttle's robot arm to create 3-D images of the gash and a few other damaged areas that NASA officials say pose no threat. Mission managers expect to decide Monday, or Tuesday at the latest, whether to send astronauts out to patch the gouge. Engineers are trying to determine whether the marred area can withstand the searing heat of atmospheric re-entry at flight's end. Actual heating tests will be conducted on similarly damaged samples. «This is something we would rather not deal with but we have really prepared for exactly this case,» John Shannon, chairman of the mission management team was quoted as saying by the Associated Press.
