Astronauts in final checks before return to earth

ASTRONAUTS completed flight control checks aboard space shuttle Discovery and practiced landing on a computer simulator as they made final preparations to return to Earth.

“It’s time to come home and keep working on getting the shuttle better and ready to fly in the future again,” Commander Eileen Collins said yesterday.

As the crew prepared for the return trip, the seven astronauts got good news from mission control. For the first time in three years, all four gyroscopes that control the orientation of the International Space Station were working.

Discovery’s astronauts spent nine days of their 13-day mission resupplying the orbiting lab and two spacewalking astronauts replaced a gyroscope, which stopped working in 2002. They also restored power to another gyroscope, which stopped spinning in March.

The station’s crew waited until Discovery undocked to rev up all four gyroscopes at once.

“There’s lots of cheering on board Discovery right now,” Ms Collins radioed back to the ground.

While in orbit, Discovery’s crew unloaded the station’s rubbish, conducted intense inspections of their shuttle for damage and tested repair techniques developed after the 2003 Columbia tragedy.

During an unprecedented spacewalk to repair the ship, astronaut Stephen Robinson pulled two strips of protruding tile filler from beneath Discovery’s belly. Engineers on the ground had worried if the strips weren’t removed, they could cause dangerous overheating during re-entry.

“It’s been an outstandingly successful mission,” deputy shuttle program manager Wayne Hale said of Discovery. “We accomplished everything that we set out to do and more.”