Shuttle Lands at Kennedy Space Center

by editor2
September 21st, 2006

CAPE CANAVERAL, Sept. 21 — The space shuttle Atlantis glided down to an uneventful pre-dawn landing today, concluding a mission that resumed NASA’s construction work on the International Space Station.

The Atlantis fired its engines at 5:14 a.m. for 2 minutes, 40 seconds, slowing it by about 205 miles per hour and sending it falling back out of orbit toward Earth. It descended into the atmosphere over the southern Pacific Ocean, crossing Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula and then the Gulf of Mexico to approach Florida from the southwest. It touched down on the runaway at the Kennedy Space Center at 6:21 a.m.

The sky was still dark when Atlantis arrived, making the 15th nighttime shuttle landing at Kennedy, and the weather was ideal: clear with no winds.

“It’s nice to be back,” Capt. Brent W. Jett Jr., the shuttle commander, said after landing. “It was a great team effort, so I think assembly is off to a good start.”

Atlantis landed during its 187th circuit around Earth, having traveled 4.91 million miles.

The landing was delayed by one day after a small object was spotted floating near Atlantis in orbit. Several other objects were spotted later, raising concerns that pieces of the shuttle’s all-important heat shield had somehow been broken off. To allay those concerns, astronauts spent Wednesday surveying the shuttle’s underside for damage. They saw none, and Atlantis was cleared for its return.

One piece of the debris was likely to have been a piece of plastic, spotted during an earlier inspection, that had wedged between the thermal tiles and then was presumably shaken loose during tests of the hydraulic systems.

Stormy weather at Kennedy on Wednesday morning probably would have kept Atlantis in orbit another day anyway, mission managers said.

Despite the glitches — in addition to the unidentified debris, Atlantis’s launching was delayed, first to check from damage and then by malfunctions in a fuel cell and a fuel tank sensor — the astronauts accomplished their primary goal of hauling up a 35,000-pound segment to the space station, the first addition since late 2002.

“I have to remind everyone we’re back in the assembly business,” N. Wayne Hale Jr, the space shuttle program manager, said at a news conference Wednesday.

During the 12-day mission, astronauts conducted three spacewalks to install the segment, which included solar arrays to generate electricity for the station and a radiator to dissipate excess heat.

The flight was the first in a tight, ambitious schedule to complete construction of the space station by 2010, when the three remaining shuttles are to be retired.

The next mission, by the shuttle Discovery, is scheduled for launching on Dec. 14, followed by five more station construction missions in 2007 and four in 2008. NASA is also expected to decide next month whether to add a shuttle mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope.

Source : http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/21/science/space/