STS-98, Mission
Control Center
Status Report # 27
Tuesday, February 20, 2001 - 3:30 p.m. CST
Atlantis' astronauts
glided to a belated but textbook touchdown at Edwards Air Force Base,
California today, wrapping up a 5.3 million mile mission to deliver
the U.S. Laboratory Destiny to the International Space Station (ISS).
With Commander
Ken Cockrell at the controls, Atlantis darted through high clouds over
the Mojave Desert test center touch down at 2:33 p.m. Central time
on concrete runway 2-2. The landing was the 47th at Edwards to bring
the 102nd flight in program history to a close.
Atlantis was diverted
to California after broken clouds and precipitation formed over the
landing strip at the Kennedy Space Center, preventing Atlantis from
returning to the Florida spaceport in the two opportunities which were
available today.
Instead, Entry
Flight Director LeRoy Cain ordered Atlantis to land 3000 miles to the
West at Edwards, where the weather was deemed acceptable for landing.
Cockrell, Pilot Mark Polansky and Mission Specialists Bob Curbeam, Marsha
Ivins and Tom Jones were greeted by high, thin clouds at Edwards, but
they posed no problem for Cockrell as he took over manual control of
Atlantis a few minutes prior to landing.
The astronauts
were scheduled to leave the orbiter about an hour after landing and
will spend the night at Edwards before returning to Houston Wednesday
afternoon.
After high winds
thwarted Atlantis' homecoming Sunday and Monday, Cockrell and Polansky
finally fired the ship's braking rockets at 1:27 p.m. Central time for
the start of the Shuttle's hour-long descent back to Earth. Thirty-four
minutes later, Atlantis and its astronauts reached the fringes of Earth's
atmosphere and the first tug of gravity at an altitude of 400,000 feet.
Atlantis soared
over the Pacific Ocean and the southern California coast north of Los
Angeles, its computers honing in on the desert runway at Edwards. About
four minutes before landing, Atlantis heralded its arrival at the landing
site with a pair of double sonic booms as it went subsonic. Atlantis
kicked up a small cloud of dust as its main gear met the runway and
rolled out to a smooth stop as more clouds gathered around the Edwards
complex.
Meanwhile, aboard
the International Space Station, Expedition One Commander Bill Shepherd,
Pilot Yuri Gidzenko and Flight Engineer Sergei Krikalev spent the day
activating additional systems in the recently delivered Destiny Laboratory
and began preparations for Saturday's undocking and redocking of their
Soyuz capsule from the aft docking port of the Zvezda module to the
Earthward facing docking port of the Zarya module.
That relocation
maneuver, which is scheduled to begin just after 4 a.m. Central time
Saturday, will clear the Zvezda docking port for the arrival of an unmanned
Progress resupply craft next week, delivering supplies for the next
Expedition crew which will be launched on the Shuttle Discovery on March
8 on the STS-102 mission.
Atlantis' astronauts
are scheduled to return to Houston Wednesday afternoon for a welcome
home ceremony at Hangar 990 at Ellington Field near the Johnson Space Center at around 3:30 p.m. Central time. Any updates to the astronauts'
schedule will be available Wednesday by calling the Johnson Space Center newsroom at 281-483-5111.
-end-
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