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Originally Posted by Bcahn836
You may be right. . . I just heard that a small piece of foam tile broke off the shuttle but the crew is going to try and fix it.
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Woah, you got your info a little confused. The foam insulation on the external tank did shed in at least three places, but there are no such thing as foam tiles. The largest piece of foam was the one in the picture I posted, which came from the Protuberance Air Load (PAL) Ramp, while the two smaller ones came from the left bipod area (the area where the foam that hit Columbia came from). You can see a nice high-res picture of the tank missing all three pieces of foam at
http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/123625main_s114e5070_high.jpg (1.5MB). While it doesn't look like the big foam piece hit anything, it is unknown what happened to the little pieces. However, even the big piece is smaller than the bipod ramp that hit Columbia. These cannot be repaired as the tank has already burned up in the atmosphere.
Seperately, a small piece of tile (approx. 1 square inch) chipped off the forward landing gear well door on the shuttle orbiter. This is not really a concern, as there have been literally thousands of documented tile shedding events, and none have resulted in vehicle damage during reentry (Columbia had a damaged RCC panel, which is very different).
There are currently no plans for actual tile repair on the vehicle. There are plans (which have always been part of the mission) to test repair methods on pre-damaged panels which are being stored in a box in the payload bay, but none of these repair methods are flight-certified yet. Unless the analysis of the LIDAR (laser scanner) data shows that a significant amount of tile is missing, this is not expected to change.
However, as a result of the foam shedding, the shuttle fleet has been grounded (meaning that Atlantis probably won't fly this year).