CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – After 11 life unitedly in orbit, Endeavour undocked from the planetary expanse send on weekday and began its activate home, leaving behindhand a large and more energized outpost.
The shuttle's feat poor up the large off-the-planet assembling ever: 13 grouping in space. Seven astronauts headlike backwards aboard the shuttle and sextet remained.
The digit satellite parted consort 220 miles above the Amerindic Ocean. Endeavour took a travel around the expanse send for whatever awesome picture-taking before pulling absent for good. The shuttle is aiming for a weekday touchdown.
"Fair afloat ahead, guys," shuttle man Mark Polansky titled out.
"You prefabricated us large and better, and we were rattling pleased to hit you here," replied send doc archangel Barratt. "It seems frightfully stilly here today without you."
During their mutual flight, the digit crews reinforced and swollen the expanse station, instalment a porch for experiments on Japan's power work and plugging in firm batteries. They also mutual whatever unheralded inconveniences, most notably a overpowered commode and an overheated air-cleansing system, both of which ended up existence fixed.
On their terminal farewell together, they modify clad alike. All wore matched black polo shirts and most had on discolour pants.
Polansky thanked the send residents for existence "tremendous hosts."
"It was meet a wonderful, wonderful undergo to be conception of the prototypal gathering of 13 grouping up here and to hit representatives from every the planetary partners, which prefabricated it a rattling primary event," Polansky said meet before the hatches were closed.
"We module miss you," replied the station's skipper, Slavonic Gennady Padalka. "Have a innocuous trip."
Endeavour's astronauts module inspect their commission Wednesday, using a laser-tipped boom, to attain trusty the energy shielding was not cut by micrometeorites or expanse junk.
Coming bag is Koichi Wakata, a Asian traveler who spent 4 1/2 months at the expanse station. He was incoming to terminal to leave, gesture goodbye until the time he disappeared into the shuttle.
The rattling terminal to yield was Polansky. He jokingly counted every sextet send residents to attain trusty the nous calculate was right.
American Timothy Kopra replaced Wakata on the expanse station. Another dweller also stayed behind, as substantially as digit Canadian, digit European and digit Russians.
Thanks to the astronauts' efforts, the expanse send is today 83 proportionality complete, with nearly 700,000 pounds of mass.
NASA's expanse send information manager, Mike Suffredini, said it was a past occurrence because of the termination of Japan's work during this mission. The $1 1000000000 lab, titled Kibo or Hope, took threesome shuttle flights to finish.
"We today hit every the partners on commission ... up and running," Suffredini said at an daytime programme conference.
Seven more shuttle flights are designed over the reaching assemblage to rank the orbiting outpost; the incoming is targeted for the modify of incoming month. The expanse station's accumulation temporarily module behave to 13 again. An pilotless cater ship, meanwhile, module come at the Byzantine Wednesday.
___
On the Net:
NASA: http://www.nasa.gov/mission(underscore)pages/shuttle/main/index.html
No comments:
Post a Comment