Shuttle Landing Postponed

After some sort of unidentified object was seen floating away from the shuttle. NASA engineers are not sure what the object was, or even how big it was.

Space agency officials wanted extra time to establish whether the object was a vital piece of the shuttle — such as the tiles that protect it from the blowtorch heat of re-entry — and whether it damaged the spacecraft when it fell away.

"The question is: What is it? Is it something benign? … Or is it something more critical we should pay attention to?" said Wayne Hale, space shuttle program manager. "We want to make sure we're safe to land before we commit to that rather incredible journey through the Earth's atmosphere."

The shuttle has enough supplies to stay in space until Saturday while engineers on the ground figure out whether the shuttle can safely make the journey home.

Before the postponement, Atlantis had been scheduled to touch down just before daybreak Wednesday, when the weather forecast wasn't favorable for landing for anyway.

The incident came near the end of what had been a nearly flawless mission devoted to restarting construction of the international space station for the first time since the Columbia tragedy 3 1/2 years ago.

Mission Control spotted the baffling object — the size of which was not immediately determined — with a video camera in the shuttle's cargo bay. The object probably came out of the cargo bay early Tuesday, officials said.

The object floated near the shuttle in the same orbit for a while, slipping farther and farther away until it was just a dark speck in NASA video beamed down to Earth.

The object has not been located with radar, either. The NASA Shuttle Mission page is here. You can see the video of the press conference.