Cape Canaveral, Fla. - After two
false starts, the seven astronauts aboard shuttle Atlantis will finally land
Sunday to end their successful repair mission to the Hubble Space Telescope.
The only question is where.
Rain and thunderstorms over NASA's
primary landing site here at the Kennedy Space Center thwarted the shuttle's
attempts to return to Earth on Friday and Saturday.
NASA hopes for better weather in
Florida on Sunday to allow a planned 10:11 a.m. EDT (1411 GMT) touchdown, but
Mission Control is ready to land Atlantis at a backup runway in California if
conditions don't improve.
"We plan on landing you tomorrow,"
Mission Control radioed the shuttle crew on Saturday.
Atlantis commander Scott Altman told
flight controllers that his Hubble
repair crew appreciated the effort Mission Control put into tracking their
landing day weather and looks forward to coming home.
"We will see you tomorrow," Altman
told Mission Control.
Atlantis actually has enough
supplies to sustain its astronaut crew through Monday, but NASA plans to land
the shuttle somewhere on Earth by mid-day today. The first California landing
opportunity after Florida is at 11:40 a.m. EDT (1540 GMT).
Norm Knight, the flight director in
charge of Atlantis' landing, told reporters on Thursday that if weather kept
the shuttle in space on Friday and Saturday - as it did - then Sunday would be
his "pick 'em" day, where he'd land the spacecraft wherever conditions would
permit. NASA typically keeps one landing day in reserve in case of an unexpected
glitch delays landing further.
NASA prefers to land space shuttles
in Florida since the Kennedy Space Center is both their home port and launch
site. It costs $1.8 million to ferry a space shuttle across the country from
California. That piggyback flight atop a modified jumbo jet carrier craft takes
at least a week, weather permitting.
The weather in California is
expected to be favorable for a shuttle landing through Monday. Bad weather is
still expected over Florida on Sunday, but it may be less severe than in recent
days, NASA officials said.
"It might just be a little more
stable," said John Madura, weather office chief at the Kennedy Space Center.
"There's some little ray of hope there."
Headed home
Altman and his crew are returning to
Earth after overhauling
Hubble for the fifth and final time. Set to return to Earth with Altman are
shuttle pilot Greg C. Johnson and mission specialists Michael Good, Megan
McArthur, John Grunsfeld, Michael Massimino and Andrew Feustel.
During five back-to-back spacewalks,
the astronauts added new instruments, replaced old batteries and gyroscopes,
and revived two broken instruments by performing unprecedented repairs.
The astronauts launched on May 11
and returned Hubble to space for good on Tuesday. Hubble scientists said
the space telescope is more powerful than any other time since its 1990 launch,
and is ready for at least five more years - possibly 10 more - of scanning
the cosmos.
The Atlantis crew also prepared
Hubble for its eventual death by attaching a docking ring. It will allow a
robotic spacecraft to latch onto the space telescope sometime after 2020 and
send it plummeting into the Pacific Ocean.
With NASA's three-shuttle fleet set
to retire next year, Atlantis' flight to Hubble is the agency's last-ever
mission to repair and upgrade the iconic space telescope. The shuttle fleet's
capsule-based replacement, Orion, will be used to transport
astronauts to and from the International Space Station and, ultimately, the
moon when it enters service around 2015.
NASA officials have said the Hubble
mission cost about $1.1 billion. In all, nearly $10 billion has been invested
in the space telescope since its inception.
SPACE.com is providing continuous
coverage of NASA's last mission to the Hubble Space Telescope with senior
editor Tariq Malik in Cape Canaveral, Fla., and reporter Clara Moskowitz in New
York. Click here for
landing coverage, mission updates and SPACE.com's live NASA TV video
feed. Live coverage begins at 6:30 a.m. EDT.
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