CAPE
CANAVERAL, Fla. — With the successful Saturday return of the space shuttle
Discovery, the stage is set for NASA's next flight: the final visit to the
Hubble Space Telescope.
Discovery's
seven-astronaut crew landed at 11:15 a.m. EDT (1515 GMT) here at NASA's Kennedy
Space Center after a successful two-week mission that delivered Japan's billion-dollar
Kibo laboratory to the International Space Station (ISS).
"It's great
to be here on the runway in sunny Florida," Discovery commander Mark Kelly said
after the smooth
landing. "The vehicle's in good shape, which we always like to see it that
way."
Discovery's
return to Earth clears the way for the planned Oct. 8 launch of its sister ship
Atlantis, which is set to fly one last mission to overhaul
the Hubble Space Telescope before NASA turns its full attention to completing
the space station by 2010 and retiring its three-orbiter fleet.
But first,
NASA has to fix blast damage to its prime shuttle launch site — Pad 39A — after
Discovery's liftoff ripped some 5,300 heat-resistant bricks from their concrete
moorings at the 1960s-era pad.
NASA has
two seaside shuttle launch sites, Pad 39A and Pad 39B, but is converting the
latter to host future flights of its new Ares I rocket and Orion crew capsules.
However, both pads are required for the Hubble mission since, unlike station-bound
flights, Atlantis astronauts won't have the safe haven of the ISS to turn to if
their spacecraft is damaged because the space telescope is in a different
orbit. Instead, a second shuttle would be readied at Pad 39B to serve as a
rescue ship, NASA has said.
Michael
Leinbach, NASA's shuttle launch director, said there is ample time to complete repairs
to Pad 39A before late August, when the agency plans to roll Atlantis out
to the Pad 39A.
"A lot of folks
feel like we have pretty sufficient amount of time available to do a repair and
make it flyable again, well in time for the Hubble mission," Leinbach said. "It's
a significant job, but the team is up to it."
With nearly
four months until the next launch, a planned gap due to fuel tank delays, there
should also be enough time to give shuttle engineers some well-deserved time
off, he added.
Orbital
science ahead
In the
meantime, NASA plans to make the most of the months between now and the next
shuttle flight to the space station, a logistics flight currently slated to lift
off on Nov. 10 aboard the Endeavour orbiter.
William
Gerstenmaier, NASA's associate administrator of space operations, said he
expects U.S. astronaut Gregory Chamitoff and his two Russian crewmates aboard
the station to take advantage of the shuttle lull to perform science in the
station's new Kibo laboratory and Europe's Columbus lab, which was delivered earlier
this year. Chamitoff arrived at the station last week aboard Discovery and
replaced U.S. astronaut Garrett Reisman as an Expedition 17 flight engineer.
Built by
the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), Japan's 37-foot (11-meter) Kibo
lab is about the size of a large tour bus and the largest room ever launched to
the space station. JAXA officials hope to begin the first experiments in the module
in August to christen a Japanese space laboratory that has been more than 20
years in the making.
"I was
personally moved that Kibo is now in space," said JAXA vice president Kaoru
Mamiya, who remembers helping to plan the new laboratory on paper two decades
ago. "It was my dream to see Kibo in space and that dream has come true."
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