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[i]What I gathered from today, and of course the engineers are going to go off and talk about this in great detail, but basically the damage is significant and is widespread. I'm not qualified or ready to draw conclusions here today, but we know that the damage is consistent around the race ring. The crew did report the gear teeth themselves looked clean and did not appear to be damaged or rubbed in any off-nominal way, which I took to be good news. What we've done is put the program in a better position on STS-122 to understand what they need to do in terms of either SARJ cleaning or SARJ repairs, etc. So we've gathered additional data, verified the extent of the damage and now the folks have some work to do to quantify and plan exactly what they're going to do to address the SARJ issues on their mission.[/i]
[i]In a worst-case scenario, the 12 bearing assemblies and two drive motors could be moved to the redundant gear during three to four spacewalks. But engineers do not want to consider such a drastic step until they figure out what is causing the problem with the active gear and race ring. The problem is not serious in the near term because the station's arrays can generate enough power even with the starboard blankets locked in place. But the starboard SARJ must be back in operation by next April when NASA plans to launch Japan's Kibo research module.[/i]
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