CAPE
CANAVERAL, Fla. -- The successful return of seven astronauts aboard NASA's shuttle
Atlantis kicks off a challenging construction year for the International Space
Station (ISS), NASA officials said Friday.
Atlantis returned
Friday with veteran shuttle flyer Rick Sturckow at the helm to complete NASA's
STS-117 mission to deliver new trusses, solar arrays and one crewmember to the
ISS.
"It was a beautiful
landing out there, right on the money," NASA launch director Mike Leinbach said
after Atlantis' 3:49 p.m. EDT (1949 GMT) arrival at a backup runway at
California's Edwards Air Force Base.
The shuttle's
14-day spaceflight primed the orbital laboratory for the addition of a new connecting
module and the European Space Agency's Columbus laboratory later this year,
as well as the first pieces of Japan's three-segment
Kibo module in early 2008.
To do that,
NASA plans to launch the space shuttle Endeavour's STS-118 mission on Aug. 9 to
deliver a small spacer piece to the station's starboard truss. Barbara Morgan, NASA's
first educator-astronaut, will also fly on that mission.
The shuttle
Discovery follows on Oct. 20 to haul the Harmony connecting node to the ISS,
with Atlantis again on tap to deliver Columbus in December. Each of those spaceflights,
plus vital spacewalks and other assembly tasks by ISS crews in between them,
must occur in order to continue the station's construction.
"I think
there's even bigger challenges in front of us as we continue assembly through the
rest of this year," said Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA's associate administrator for
space operations, after the STS-117 mission.
NASA plans
at least 12 more shuttle flights through September 2010 to complete the space
station's construction. Two additional shuttle flights to ship cargo, spare
parts and equipment to the ISS, may also fly. One additional flight to service the
Hubble Space Telescope in September 2008 is also on tap.
Learning
from glitches
Gerstenmaier
said NASA and its international partners have taken key lessons from Atlantis'
STS-117 mission.
Engineers
have already performed a series of pull tests on protective thermal blankets
aboard Endeavour to ensure their secure after a similar one peeled back from
its left aft engine pod mount during Atlantis' June 8 launch.
STS-117
spacewalker Danny Olivas secured
the torn blanket with medical staples and pins. While an initial inspection
found a slight gap between the blanket and surrounding heat tiles after
landing, the anchor pins were still in place, NASA said.
Gerstenmaier
said that a major crash of vital Russian control and navigation systems during
the STS-117 mission has also paid off with lessons of the limits of current and
future station hardware.
Engineers
and ISS cosmonauts traced the crash to the failure of redundant surge-protector
like circuits within the computers, and then bypassed
the fault using jumper cables. But it will likely take months to determine
exactly what caused the circuits to fail in the first place.
During that
time, ISS engineers will take a close look at similar computer systems aboard
the Columbus laboratory and Europe's unmanned station cargo ship, the Automated
Transfer Vehicle, Gerstenmaier said.
Meanwhile,
Atlantis' seven-astronaut crew will return to Houston - home of NASA's Johnson
Space Center astronaut training facility - for some much-deserved rest.
"This
flight crew did a phenomenal job on orbit," Gerstenmaier said of the STS-117
astronaut. "They seem in great spirits"
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