HOUSTON -- Seven shuttle astronauts will say their
orbital goodbyes to the three-person crew of the International Space
Station (ISS) after a busy week of construction aboard the high-flying
laboratory.
The STS-116
astronaut crew of NASA's shuttle Discovery is due to cast of from the space station at 5:09 p.m. EST (2209 GMT) to
begin the trek back to Earth following an intense eight days of docked operations [video].
"We only have only more major objective to
complete," said John Curry, NASA's lead ISS flight director for Discovery's STS-116
mission.
That
objective, he added, is undocking.
The space
station's Expedition
14 crew and Discovery's
STS-116 astronauts will spend this morning transferring some final items
between their two spacecraft. They are expected to hold a brief farewell
ceremony before shutting the hatches between their two vehicles at 1:57 p.m. EST (1857 GMT).
Because of a spacewalk
Monday, the two astronaut crews had one extra day to work alongside each
other 220 miles (354 kilometers) above Earth.
"There's no
such thing as a bad day in space," Discovery's STS-116
commander Mark Polansky told reporters in an interview on NASA TV. "So I
think everybody is happy to maximize the experience."
Discovery's
crew delivered a small,
but vital, addition to the space station's main truss and performed four
spacewalks -- including Monday's
unplanned excursion -- to install it, rewire
the orbital laboratory's power grid and furl a stubborn
solar array that ultimately took some prodding to stow.
"We really
like to have a day between the last spacewalk and undocking normally," Curry
said, adding that the final spacewalk to added an extra heavy duty work day to
the joint crew's schedule. "We know we'll be able to get everything
accomplished. They're just going to have to press, you know, there's not going
to be a lot of celebration time on orbit for them."
To ease
some of that strain, mission managers have pushed back Discovery's undocking to
a later time than typical of shuttle departures, mission managers said. But the
change did mean the astronauts will not have enough time to fly completely
around the ISS, they added.
Known as a flyaround,
the maneuver is typically performed, given adequate time and propellant
supplies, to allow a photography session to document the space station's new
appearance -- now with one solar wing stowed and a new spacer on its port side
-- for use by engineers and release to the public.
"We're not
going to do the full flyaround," Curry said. "We're just going to fly up to the
top and then [separate]."
Discovery
is also leaving the ISS with a different crew complement than when it arrived.
One STS-116
astronaut, mission specialist Sunita
Williams, is remaining aboard the station as a flight engineer alongside
Expedition 14 commander Michael Lopez-Alegria and flight engineer Mikhail
Tyurin. She is exchanging roles with European Space Agency astronaut Thomas
Reiter, who has lived aboard the ISS since
July, and nearing the end of his ISS mission.
"I've been
living here now for a long time and this has become a home," Reiter said of his
ISS departure. "So it will be a little bit of a sad moment to leave my
colleagues up here."
Reiter and
the rest of Discovery's STS-116 crew are due to return to Earth Friday, with
touchdown at NASA's Shuttle Landing Facility at the Kennedy Space Center in
Cape Canaveral, Florida set for 3:56 p.m. EST (2056 GMT).
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