Discovery crew relax after mission accomplished

by Rich Bowden - Jun 12 2008, 20:35

The crew of the space shuttle Discovery yesterday relaxed after leaving the International Space Station (ISS) on Wednesday prior to an expected Saturday landing.

Discovery successfully delivered the second component of the Japanese space laboratory "Kibo" and its astronauts completed three spacewalks to maintain the station and undock and set up the bus-sized space lab.

Space.com reported that the commander of the mission Mark Kelly said he planned to use the orbit of the space shuttle to hunt out Mt Everest, something he had yet to see from space, despite being on his third mission.

"It's hard to identify because you're looking down and you can't tell which one is the biggest one," Kelly said adding that to take a picture, planning was all-important. "To take a picture of Earth, you've got to plan about halfway around the planet."

The space shuttle dropped off NASA astronaut Gregory Chamitoff when it arrived at the ISS last week and picked up mission specialist Garrett Reisman,  who will return to Earth ending his three month mission.

Prior to his departure from the space station Wednesday with the shuttle, Reisman said he would miss the weightlessness experienced in space: "We call it floating, but really it's more like flying because as soon as you push off, you're flying through the air like some sort of superhero," Reisman said. "To be able to do that every day as you're coming in to work, it's unreal. That's what I'll miss the most."

Also returning to Earth with commander Kelly and Reisman are shuttle pilot Kenneth Ham and mission specialists Karen Nyberg, Ronald Garan, Michael Fossum and Akihiko Hoshide, a Japanese space agency (JAXA) astronaut whose mission was to help deliver and set up the Kibo space lab.

STS-124 Discovery is expected to return to land at NASA's Kennedy Space Centre in Cape Canaveral, Florida at 11.15 a.m. EDT (1515 GMT).

Around the Web