The US shuttle Discovery touched down in Florida on Saturday, capping a successful 14-day mission to deliver and open Japan’s first space laboratory at the International Space Station (ISS).
Under a sunny sky, the orbiter carrying seven astronauts landed right on time at 11:15am at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral after gliding over Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula as it plunged toward Earth.
“Beautiful landing, Mark, and congratulations on a great mission,” a mission control official told Discovery commander Mark Kelly.
“It’s great to be back, and it’s great for all of us to be part of a big team that made the station a little bit bigger, a little bit more capable,” Kelly replied.
After traveling 217 orbits and 9.2 million kilometers around Earth, Discovery plunged toward the planet at more than 20 times the speed of sound before slowing down for its landing.
A double sonic boom signaled the shuttle’s imminent arrival. Three minutes before landing, Kelly took the shuttle off auto-pilot and steered it toward Kennedy’s landing strip number 15.
NASA had given the shuttle the green light to wrap up its two-week journey and return to Earth after it determined that the loss of a small clip from its rudder posed no risk during landing.
The agency has kept a close eye on the shuttle’s protective thermal layer since a crack in Columbia’s heat shield caused the orbiter to explode as it re-entered Earth’s atmosphere in February 2003, killing its seven astronauts.
Discovery undocked from the ISS on Wednesday about 344km above the South Pacific east of Australia. The shuttle’s main task was to deliver, open and outfit the 11.2m long, 4.4m wide main module of the Japanese Kibo laboratory, which became the station’s biggest facility.
At a press briefing after the landing, Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide described his feelings when Discovery left the ISS and the Kibo lab he had known and monitored back at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.
“When we went to close the hatch, that was a tender moment, it was kind of sad,” he said.
Kibo — which means “Hope” in Japanese — represents Japan’s and Asia’s first major contribution to the orbiting international station, which already has modules from the US, Russia and the European Space Agency.
Shuttle Endeavour had already brought the bus-sized lab’s storage room in March.
The third and final part of the lab — an outdoor facility that will allow experiments to be exposed to the effects of space — will be delivered next year.
When completed, Kibo will allow astronauts to carry out experiments in medicine, biology and biotechnology, material production and communications, both in a pressurized environment and completely exposed to space.
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