This
story was updated at 2:23 p.m. EDT.
CAPE
CANAVERAL, Fla. — The space shuttle Discovery landed safely back on Earth
Saturday to wrap up a two-week mission that delivered a new Japanese laboratory
to the International Space Station (ISS).
The shuttle
touched down on a NASA runway here at the Kennedy Space Center at 11:15
a.m. EDT (1515 GMT), loosing twin sonic booms as it swooped down out of the
midday Florida sky with commander
Mark Kelly at the helm.
“Beautiful
landing, Mark,” astronaut Terry Virts radioed the crew from Mission
Control in Houston. “Congratulations on a great mission.”
“It’s
great to be back,” Kelly replied. “And it’s great for all of
us to be part of a team that made the space station a little bit bigger and a
little bit more capable.”
Kelly and
his six-man, one-woman crew delivered a new crewmember, spare Russian space
toilet parts and the massive $1
billion Kibo
research module for the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) while
docked at the orbiting laboratory.
The
astronauts launched May 31 and completed 217 trips around Earth during their
5.7 million-mile (9.1 million-km) construction flight.
Returning
to Earth with Kelly were shuttle pilot Kenneth Ham, mission specialists Karen
Nyberg, Ronald Garan,
Michael Fossum,
Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide
and returning space station crewmember Garrett Reisman.
Together
they performed three spacewalks to maintain the station, test out ways to clean
a damaged solar array gear and outfit the new Kibo lab. They also attached Kibo’s rooftop
storage module, which a previous crew delivered in to a temporary berth last March.
“I
think is just a start, just a beginning,” said Hoshide before landing. “We learned
a lot from this mission, so we’ll just continue to learn more.”
Space
station’s new “Hope”
Weighing in
at some 32,000 pounds (14,514 kg), Japan’s
Kibo
(which means “hope” in Japanese) is 37 feet (11 meters) long, about
the size of a large tour bus and the largest room ever launched to the space
station. It has two small windows, a 33-foot (10-meter) main robotic arm and a
small airlock for passing experiments out to a porch-like external platform
slated to launch next year.
Nyberg said
the views out the Kibo
lab’s side-looking windows were tremendous and offered a new perspective
of Earth from the space station.
“It’s
a great view looking in a direction that we can’t see in other parts of
the U.S. segment,” she said. “Watching the sunset was my absolute
favorite, and I think we got a lot of pictures of that.”
With Kibo’s
installation, the space station is about
71 percent complete, weighs about 612,000 pounds (277,598 kg) and has a
living area about the size of the interior of a 747 jumbo jet, according to
NASA and station crew. When complete, the station is slated to have about as
much room as a five bedroom home and rival a U.S. football field in length,
NASA has said.
For Reisman,
Discovery’s landing marked his first taste of Earth’s gravity after
95 days living in space, and he returned to Earth in a special reclined seat to
ease the burden. He arrived at the space station in March and was replaced last
week by NASA astronaut Gregory Chamitoff, who launched aboard Discovery.
“I am
cautiously optimistic,” he said of how his body will respond to its
return to gravity, adding that there is some anecdotal evidence than his short
stature may help since his sensory organs are closer to his center of gravity.
“I’ve been waiting my whole life and I finally think being short is
going to come in handy.”
It apparently
did. After landing, Reisman was all smiles in NASA video as he walked on the
tarmac with his crewmates to inspect Discovery and pose for photos.
“He
told us, frankly, that he enjoyed feeling the sunshine again,” said
William Gerstenmaier, NASA’s chief of space operations. “I think he
had a great time onboard space station.”
Reisman
has said he’s looking forward to seeing his wife Simone and cat Fuzzy
again, and digging into a juicy steak after landing.
Chamitoff,
meanwhile, is beginning a six-month mission and watched a live broadcast of
Discovery’s landing from orbit.
“What
a beautiful landing!” Chamitoff
told Mission Control. “It was a spectacular mission from end to
end…we have this new ‘hope’ in the Kibo module here on the space station
and it’s a great success.”
Successful
flight
Today’s
landing marked the end of NASA’s 123rd space shuttle mission and the 26th
construction flight to the space station. Discovery made its 35th trip to space
during the mission, the third shuttle flight this year to deliver a new orbital
room to the high-flying station.
“We
are very pleased with the mission’s accomplishments,” said
NASA’s deputy shuttle program manager LeRoy Cain. “We’re very
proud of the whole team.”
NASA plans
to fly 10 more shuttle flights to complete the space station and overhaul the
Hubble Space Telescope before retiring its aging three-orbiter fleet in 2010.
The Hubble mission - the final servicing flight to the orbital observatory - is
currently slated to liftoff on Oct. 8 pending
the repair of its Pad 39A launch site here, which was damaged during
Discovery’s launch.
The
successful STS-124 spaceflight marked NASA’s third of up to five shuttle
flights this year, with the Hubble serving mission and a fourth flight to the
space station remaining. It was the 10th mission since the 2003
Columbia tragedy.
“The
whole experience turned out to be more emotional than I’d expect,”
said shuttle pilot Ken Ham. “Seeing space station out the window and
realizing that it’s all very real and we’re part of it, it’s
a great time to be part of this country. It’s a pretty incredible
feeling.”
NASA is
broadcasting the Discovery's STS-124 mission live on NASA TV. Click here for SPACE.com's
shuttle mission updates and NASA TV feed.
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