NASA Welcomes Discovery Crew Home for the Holidays

To: SCIENCE EDITORS

Contact: Grey Hautaluoma, Headquarters, Washington, +1-202-358- 0668, Jessica Rye or Katherine Trinida, Kennedy Space Center, Fla., +1-321-867-2468, all of NASA

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., Dec. 22 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — The Space ShuttleDiscovery and its crew returned home Friday after a 13- day journey of morethan 5.3 million miles in space. Discovery’s STS- 116 mission successfullyreconfigured the International Space Station’s power and cooling systems froma temporary setup to a permanent mode and added a new piece to the station’sbackbone.

Discovery’s Commander Mark Polansky, Pilot Bill Oefelein and missionspecialists Nicholas Patrick, Bob Curbeam, Joan Higginbotham, Thomas Reiterand Christer Fuglesang landed Friday, Dec. 22, at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center,Fla., at 5:32 p.m. EST. Reiter and Fuglesang are European Space Agencyastronauts.

After landing, Polansky told Mission Control at NASA’s Johnson SpaceCenter, Houston, “Seven thrilled people right here. We’re just really proud ofthe entire NASA team that put this together. Thank you, and I think it’s goingto be a great holiday.”

The flight was the second in a series of missions that are among the mostcomplex in space history. Discovery’s crew rewired the station’s power systemand delivered a key component of the station’s structure. The segment willenable future missions to attach a new set of solar arrays.

The mission involved intensive ground commands as the station’s power wasshut down and rerouted in stages on two spacewalks. As systems were thenpowered up for the first time on their new channels, the station’s powersystem was in its final configuration, ready for further expansion with moresolar arrays and laboratories to be launched in 2007. As part of the stationpower reconfiguration and assembly process, the station flight control teamuplinked a total of 17,901 computer commands, averaging about 2,000 commandsper day. During a typical day on the station, flight controllers giveapproximately 800 commands.

The newest resident of the International Space Station also traveledaboard Discovery. Astronaut Sunita Williams joined the crew of Expedition 14.She is scheduled to spend six months on the station.

Curbeam, Fuglesang and Williams, with the help of crewmates, made fourspacewalks that completed the construction tasks, reconfigured power andcooling systems, and retracted a snagged solar array. The astronauts alsoreplaced a failed camera, cleared a worksite essential to the next shuttlemission, reconfigured power to station’s Russian segment and installed panelsto provide additional protection from space debris.

The fourth spacewalk was added to the mission to retract a solar arraythat only partially folded into its box on flight day 5. The solar wings wereretracted far enough so that the new arrays installed in September could beginto fully rotate and track the sun to provide power. Mission managers decided,however, to address the problem of the partially retracted arrays while theshuttle crew was on the station. With only several days notice, missionengineers in both the shuttle and station programs developed a spacewalk planfor Curbeam and Fuglesang that resulted in the arrays’ successful retractionon flight day 10.

Discovery’s launch was the first night liftoff of a shuttle since Nov.2002. Several inspections in orbit revealed no critical damage, andDiscovery’s thermal protection system was declared safe for re- entry on theflight’s thirteenth day.

The day before landing, pilot Bill Oefelein, who was born in Alaska, andthe rest of the Discovery crew talked to Alaskan schoolchildren from theshuttle’s flight deck.

With Discovery and its crew safely home, the stage is set for the nextphase of International Space Station assembly. Preparations continue for SpaceShuttle Atlantis’ launch, targeted for March 2007, on the STS-117 mission todeliver to the station the S3/S4 truss segment and a third set of solararrays.

For more on the STS-116 mission and the upcoming STS-117 mission, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/shuttle

SOURCE NASA

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