The shuttle Discovery safely touched down in Florida on Friday after nearly 13 days in space (Image: NASA TV)
Space shuttle Discovery and its seven-member crew landed safely on Friday at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center after worries about weather had scotched an earlier landing time.
The landing concluded a successful 13-day mission to continue construction of the International Space Station (ISS) in four space walks, including one added at the last moment to fix a stuck solar array.
High winds had put a Florida landing in question and officials at Mission Control Center in Houston, Texas, US, had called off the first possible landing attempt at 1732 EST (2232 GMT) because of the weather.
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NASA officials had hoped the weather would calm enough in Florida to avoid having the space shuttle land at Edwards Air Force Base in California or the White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico.
A landing at either location in the western US would have forced the shuttle to return to Florida, in the southeast, on the back of a modified Boeing 747 plane – at a cost of about $1.7 million.
Time crunch
There was also a worry about time running out in the mission, which lasted just a few hours short of 13 days. A landing by Saturday at the latest was required because of dwindling electrical supplies on the shuttle.
The Discovery crew spent eight days on the station, rewiring it and attaching a two-tonne truss to its girder-like structure (see Shuttle mission’s second spacewalk wraps up early).
The crew also added a day and an extra spacewalk on Monday to shake loose a solar array that had gotten stuck as it was being folded (see Troublesome space station solar array stowed at last).
The mission had a total of four space walks, including back-to-back operations two days in a row because of the need to fix the solar array.
Earlier on Friday, NASA officials awakened Discovery’s crew to the song “There’s No Place Like Home for the Holidays,” to begin preparations for the return to Earth.
“Good morning, Discovery,” mission controllers said to the seven astronauts after their musical wake-up call. “We hope you agree with us that ‘there’s no place like home for the holidays’, because we hope to see you back here on Earth later this afternoon.”
“We can’t agree more,” replied commander Mark Polansky.
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