Discovery’s Port Wing

Call them gun-shy.  Early yesterday morning a motion sensor in Discovery’s port wing recorded a small "impact"–their word, not ours–while the crew was sleeping, on the way to yesterday’s successful docking with the space station Was there anything to it?  Quick, while they had a few free moments last night, Houston asked the crew to take this picture: (If you’re having trouble making the sense of the picture, imagine yourself looking up at the end of the shuttle’s left wing, as seen from in front and below.  I’ve rotated the picture, in case you’ve seen it elsewhere, so that it’s right-side-up to us earthlings.  NASA TV image.) When Gina Sunseri called me with a heads-up, I felt my innards melting.  But when we heard from NASA’s John Shannon an hour later, he didn’t sound worried.  The motion sensors in the shuttle wings are a legacy of the Columbia accident.  Shannon said they get worried if they record a hit of 1 G; this one was 0.12 G.  It gets complicated; it’s really a geometric progression, which means the reading was about a one-hundredth of what’s worth worrying about.  There’s a bit more HERE. Are they gun-shy?  In the aftermath of the Columbia accident, would they mind being called that?