This story was updated at 11:54 p.m. EDT.
HOUSTON - With warm hugs and some
laughs, seven astronauts aboard NASA's shuttle Endeavour bid farewell to the
crew of the International Space Station (ISS) late Friday after a record
construction flight.
Shuttle commander Dominic Gorie and his crew undocked
from the space station at 8:25 p.m. EDT (0025 March 25 GMT) as both
spacecraft flew high above the west coast of Australia.
"Thanks, my friends, we'll see you
on the ground in about a month," Gorie told the
station's crew as the shuttle pulled away.
Gorie and his crew spent 12 days docked
at the space station, where they swapped out one crewmember and performed a record five spacewalks to install the Canadian-built Dextre maintenance robot and the first segment of
Japan's Kibo laboratory. They are set to land
Wednesday night at 7:05 p.m. EDT (2305 GMT) at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in
Florida to conclude their 16-day shuttle spaceflight - the longest ever sent to
the ISS.
"We really appreciate everything
you've done for us over the last couple of weeks," station commander Peggy
Whitson told the departing shuttle crew. "Thanks a bunch, and especially thanks
for being such a great bunch of guys."
An unsecured solar wing on the
station's port side delayed Endeavour's undocking by about a half-hour, but
eventually latched into place to protect the array from damage.
Heading home
Endeavour's STS-123 crew spent
the bulk of three spacewalks constructing the Canadian Space Agency's Dextre robot, a
$209-million automaton with two 11-foot (3.4-meter) long arms designed to replace astronauts on simple repair jobs outside the ISS.
They delivered and opened an attic-like
storage room for Kibo, a massive, school
bus-sized laboratory built by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and scheduled to launch
aboard NASA's shuttle Discovery on May 25. On their two last excursions, spacewalkers
tested a shuttle tile repair method and attached Endeavour's heat shield
inspection boom to the station's exterior to await Discovery's crew later 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."
NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman, who launched
aboard Endeavour on March 11 to relieve French astronaut Leopold Eyharts as
an ISS flight engineer, rang the station's bell in a tradition adopted from
naval departures.
"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."
Reisman said he was looking forward to his
two-month stay aboard the ISS, but lamented the departure of his friends aboard Endeavour.
"I already feel the nostalgia coming
on about the STS-123 crew," said Reisman, who
participated in the first of the mission's five spacewalks with crewmate Rick Linnehan. "It's just been a wonderful chapter in my life
...I'm going to miss you all, except you Rick."
Laughter, a common occurrence during
the docked mission, erupted with Resiman's joke.
"We had a great time with you guys,"
said Whitson, her voice breaking at times. "It's a lot of fun spending time
with people you can laugh and joke with. We did a little of that, as well as
getting a lot of work done."
A global space station
Endeavour's crew not only completed
Canada's three-piece robotics system with the assembly of Dextre,
but also delivered Japan's first habitable room in space to mark an ISS
milestone, mission managers said.
"We now have all of the
international partners represented in orbit," said Mike Suffredini,
NASA's space station program manger, late Monday.
Aside from a minor lighting glitch
inside the new Kibo module, and a required software patch
to fix joint glitches on Dextre, both station
additions are doing well, station managers said.
Japan's Kibo
storage module joins the station's U.S., Russian, Canadian and European
segments even as another international component - Europe's first unmanned
cargo ship Jules Verne - prepares for a series of docking tests and a planned
April 3 arrival at the ISS.
"I am very happy to be neighbors of
all of our partners now," Tetsuro Yokoyama,
operations project deputy manager for Japan's Kibo,
after Endeavour's station departure.
NASA is broadcasting Endeavour's STS-123
mission live on NASA TV. Click
here for SPACE.com's shuttle mission coverage and NASA TV feed.
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