The Endeavour Heads Home
“It’s still hard for me to feel like it’s already finished,” said Eyharts, who has lived at the station since early February. “This was a great time. It has not been boring at all.”
With a five-spacewalk mission more than well done, the seven crewmembers of the Endeavour space shuttle cast off from the International Space Station at 8:25 p.m. this evening, after a day of complete rest and relaxation Sunday, one day before leaving for home. After completing a 16-day shuttle flight—the longest on record so far—the teams had become friends and were sad about leaving. But off they went, with the undocking slowed down as it was about an hour off schedule, due to an unsecured solar wing on the ISS’s port side. Once it was latched in place to protect it from damage, the crew headed home—headed by shuttle commander Dominic Gorie. Returning home with the Endeavour crew is French astronaut Leopold Eyharts who has been at the station since, being replaced by NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman.
When the crew members undocked from the International Space Station, it was above the west coast of Australia, with an arrival on Earth due Wednesday night at 7:05 p.m. at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Many things had been accomplished with the long shuttle flight, such as majority of the spacewalks involved with getting the Canadian Space Agency’s Dextre robot up and running in an efficient manner to help the crew at the ISS—an automation with two 11-foot arms to replace the work of the ISS’s crewmembers on outside repair jobs. Also of major importance was the delivery and opening of the Japanese Laboratory called Kibo onto the ISS, adding much more room to the cramped quarters, with another section to be delivered at a later shuttle mission.
The last two missions involved the shuttle tile repair methods, and the attachment of the Endeavour’s heat shield inspection boom for the following Discovery mission later on this year. “Getting through five [spacewalks] were pretty scary hurdles to overcome and you guys made it easy,” Gorie told the station’s crew. “It’s a strange feeling to want to see our families, but not want to leave a wonderful place.”
This entry was posted on Monday, March 24th, 2008 at 10:38 pm and is filed under Space Agency News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
