Space shuttle Atlantis lands in California
Space shuttle Atlantis and its crew landed in the Mojave Desert last night after three days of bad weather prevented the ship from returning to its Florida home port.
Atlantis glided through a hazy sky and touched down 13 days after lifting off for the international space station. During the mission, the five astronauts delivered and installed a £1 billion laboratory that is considered the most sophisticated research module yet to fly in space.
‘‘Welcome back to Earth after placing our Destiny in space,’’ Mission Control said, referring to the new laboratory.
Thick, low clouds kept Atlantis from touching down at Kennedy Space Centre in Cape Canaveral, Florida today. On the previous two days, the problem was gusty wind.
The weather was fine at Edwards Air Force Base, the backup landing site in California, and Mission Control gave the go-ahead for the astronauts finally to land. They had just one more day’s worth of fuel and supplies.
‘‘Pass to all the folks down at KSC and our families there that we’re sorry we won’t see them right away, but we appreciate making it home somewhere today,’’ shuttle commander Kenneth Cockrell told Mission Control.
Space shuttle landings are infrequent at Edwards, which served as the main touchdown site until the early 1990s. The last shuttle landing at Edwards was in October. The one before that was in 1996.
An Edwards landing requires the shuttle to be ferried back to Florida on a modified Boeing 747 at a cost of more than £500,000.
Because of the weather delays, Cockrell and his crew spent two days circling Earth with little to do except gaze at Earth, take photographs and exercise on a stationary cycle.
During their one week at space station Alpha, the astronauts delivered and then hooked up the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s most expensive piece of the space station, the Destiny laboratory.
Three spacewalks were needed to install the lab, hang a shutter on its porthole the finest optical-quality window yet built into a spacecraft and attach other gear to the space station.
It will be another few weeks before Destiny gets any science experiments; space shuttle Discovery is scheduled to lift off March 8 with the first batch. But already, the computer-filled lab module is controlling the steering of the space station and saving precious rocket-thruster fuel.
With the addition of Destiny, Alpha now has more living space than any of the world’s previous space stations. The space station stretches 171ft in length, 28ft longer than before.
The next major component to fly to the space station, in April, is the Canadian-built robot arm. An American-made airlock, a pressure-change room for spacewalkers, is supposed to go up in June.
At least two more laboratories, supplied by the Europeans and the Japanese, are to be delivered before space station construction ends in 2006.
