Shuttle Endeavour departed the International Space Station on Friday night and headed home, leaving behind an outpost that is nearly complete and now has the best windows ever on the world.
The shuttle undocked as the two craft soared more than 320km above the Atlantic, just west of Africa’s Western Sahara. The two crews spent 10 days together, working to install a new room, called Tranquility, and a domed observation deck the likes of which had never been seen before in orbit.
The compartments represented the last of the space station’s major building blocks.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Mission Control told the six shuttle astronauts that they’ve had “an absolutely awesome mission,” but now it was time to say “goodbye station, hello, Earth!”
Touchdown was set for late last night in Florida.
“It’s been good having you. Sorry to see you guys leave,” space station resident Timothy “TJ” Creamer called out as Endeavour backed away.
“We’re sorry to go,” shuttle commander George Zamka replied. “Hope you get to enjoy Tranquility and the new view.”
The seven windows in the space station’s new lookout were shuttered before Endeavour’s departure, to protect against thruster contamination. The shuttle astronauts took one last long look out those windows late on Thursday before retreating back into their ship to prepare for the undocking.
Endeavour then took a slow lap around the orbiting complex for picture-taking.
“Godspeed guys,” radioed the space station’s skipper, Jeffrey Williams.
Thanks to Endeavour and its crew, the space station is now 98 percent complete, with a mass of almost 400 tonnes. The two new compartments — worth more than US$400 million — were supplied by the European Space Agency.
Tranquility arrived empty but as of Friday night was already full of exercise and life-support equipment as well as a toilet.
The station’s water-recycling system — for converting astronauts’ urine into drinking water — apparently sprang a leak after it was moved into Tranquility a few days ago.
About a liter of urine is missing and most likely contained somewhere in the system. Williams spent Friday evening trying to find the source of the leak.
Only four shuttle flights remain. Discovery is up next; it will carry up more supplies and science experiments in early April.
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has hit a record high of more than 95,000, almost 90 percent of whom are women, government data showed yesterday. The figures further highlight the slow-burning demographic crisis gripping the world’s fourth-biggest economy as its population ages and shrinks. As of Sept. 1, Japan had 95,119 centenarians, up 2,980 year-on-year, with 83,958 of them women and 11,161 men, the Japanese Ministry of Health said in a statement. On Sunday, separate government data showed that the number of over-65s has hit a record high of 36.25 million, accounting for 29.3 percent of