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.

FMI: www.nasa.gov/shuttle