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287 days ago
(http://www.nytimes.com)
Category: Science Discovery Environment |
The shuttle landed at 8:39 p.m., roughly an hour after the shuttle’s commander, Capt. Dominic L. Gorie, fired twin braking rockets that brought the spacecraft out of orbit.
Mission managers canceled the day’s first landing opportunity, which would have brought the Endeavour to the runway at 7:05 p.m.; clouds threatened to obscure the site. After consulting with weather officers and Captain Gorie, however, the managers determined that conditions were improving by the time the second opportunity of the day came around and ordered Captain Gorie to bring the shuttle out of orbit and bring it and its crew of seven astronauts down to the 15,000-foot landing strip at the Kennedy Space Center.
“Good news,” Lt. Col. James P. Dutton of the Air Force, an astronaut in Mission Control, told the Endeavour’s crew shortly after 7 p.m. “You are ‘go’ for the de-orbit burn,” he said, referring to the rocket firing that brakes the shuttle out of orbit.
Captain Gorie had said the end of the long mission was bittersweet, but the crew and the shuttle were ready to return home. “The orbiter’s really been performing really marvelously this whole flight,” he said late Tuesday. “We don’t have any concerns at all about it.”
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