Thu, Mar 26, 2009
Undocks From ISS After Nine-Day Stay
The shuttle Discovery separated from
the International Space Station at 3:53 pm EDT Wednesday, after
spending 9 days, 20 hours and 10 minutes docked to the orbital
outpost.
Reuters reports station commander Mike Fincke told the Discovery
crew as they gathered to say good-bye, "It was really great having
you up here. You've made the space station much better than it was
before." Fincke, along with flight engineer Yury Lonchakov, will
return to Earth next month after a six-month stay on the
station.
They'll be replaced by Commander Gennady Padalka and flight
engineer Michael Barratt. The two will join second-time space
tourist Charles Simonyi aboard a Russian Soyuz vehicle scheduled
for launch Thursday morning from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in
Kazakhstan.
The third member of their crew is Japan's Koichi Wakata, who
already made the trip with Discovery on STS-119. He replaced
astronaut Sandra Magnus, who is returning onboard Discovery from
her six-month stay onboard the station.
On Thursday, the crew will wake at 5:13 am and perform a late
inspection of Discovery's thermal protection system using the
shuttle robotic arm and the Orbital Boom Sensor System around 9:28
am. This procedure will last for approximately five hours before
the OBSS and arm are then berthed in Discovery’s payload bay
around 2:43 pm. Landing is scheduled for Saturday at the Kennedy
Space Center in Florida.
The STS-119 crew flew the S6 truss segment and installed the
final set of power-generating solar arrays to the International
Space Station. The S6 truss completes the backbone of the station
and provides one-fourth of the total power needed to support a crew
of six.
The expansion of the normal crew size also hinges on proper
functioning of a troublesome liquid recycling system, which
reprocesses urine into drinkable water. Discovery delivered a new
part, and is carrying home a sample of the treated water for
analysis to see if it is drinkable.
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