HOUSTON, Texas (AP) -- Discovery's astronauts got their spaceship ready for the ride home on Tuesday, wrapping up a 15-day mission that kept the crew far busier than planned.
The space shuttle Discovery is scheduled to land Wednesday afternoon.
NASA said the preliminary weather forecast looked good for Wednesday's planned early afternoon touchdown at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The landing originally was scheduled before dawn, but commander Pamela Melroy said she asked Mission Control to switch it to daylight to make it easier on herself and her crew.
The schedule change also allowed the seven astronauts to shift their sleep time later instead of earlier, she said in an interview with The Associated Press.
This 15-day mission is longer than most -- and more stressful, too, with the astronauts required to carry out repairs to a torn solar energy panel at the space station.
Melroy said she was "extremely concerned" when spacewalker Scott Parazynski went outside to work on the ripped wing Saturday.
"You may have heard me at one point kind of squeak out 'Be careful' as I saw the solar array coming toward him," she told the AP. "But I got more comfortable because I was watching him very closely ... and he was using good body position and hand techniques."
She also took comfort in the fact that another astronaut, Douglas Wheelock, was watching over everything from the base of the solar wing.
Parazynski said that he barely managed to reach the wing's snagged wires and cut them.
"Another foot beyond that and I don't think we could have reached it," he said. "If it had been any farther away, it would have been a Plan B or C or D. I don't know what it would have been."
After leaving the space station on Monday, the astronauts used a laser- and camera-tipped boom to hunt for possible micrometeorite damage to the shuttle's wing and nose that might have occurred during the 11 days the shuttle was docked to the orbiting outpost.
NASA was finishing up its analysis of the latest laser data and expected to let the astronauts know later Tuesday if they are cleared for landing.
Because of the schedule switch to a daytime landing, Discovery will make the first coast-to-coast re-entry since Columbia disintegrated over Texas in 2003.
Discovery's original landing plan called for the ship to glide up from the southwest over Central America and the Caribbean before landing in Florida. But now the shuttle will descend over the Pacific Northwest and all the way across the country into Florida.
The astronauts woke up Tuesday morning to Deep Purple's "Space Trucking," played for astronaut Clayton Anderson, who's headed home after a five-month stay on the space station.
"You know they say all great things have to come to an end, and I'm really sorry that I have to agree with that for now, but I had an awesome ride with several awesome crews," Anderson said. "I miss my family and I miss my friends and I'm looking forward to being back on the ground."
Anderson said he's looking forward to ice-cold drinks and ice cream, which are unavailable on the space station.
Shuttle Atlantis, meanwhile, is being prepped for launch as early as December 6. It is set to deliver a new European laboratory called Columbus to the space station.
Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
0 comments:
Post a Comment