Associated Press
The space shuttle Discovery's astronauts prepared their ship for the ride home on Tuesday, wrapping up a 15-day mission that kept the crew far busier than planned.
NASA said the preliminary weather forecast looked good for Wednesday's planned early afternoon touchdown at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
(See map.)
The landing originally was scheduled before dawn, but commander Pamela Melroy said she asked Mission Control to switch it to daylight to make it easier on herself and her crew.
The schedule change also allowed the seven astronauts to shift their sleep time later instead of earlier, she said in an interview with the Associated Press (AP).
Because of the schedule switch, Discovery will make the first coast-to-coast re-entry since Columbia disintegrated over Texas in 2003.
Discovery's original landing plan called for the ship to glide up from the southwest over Central America and the Caribbean before landing in Florida. But now the shuttle will descend over the Pacific Northwest and all the way across the country into Florida.
Long Mission
This 15-day mission was longer than most—and more stressful, too, with the astronauts required to carry out repairs to a torn solar energy panel (see photo) at the International Space Station.
Melroy said she was "extremely concerned" when spacewalker Scott Parazynski went outside to work on the ripped wing Saturday.
"You may have heard me at one point kind of squeak out 'Be careful' as I saw the solar array coming toward him," she told the AP. "But I got more comfortable, because I was watching him very closely ... and he was using good body position and hand techniques."
Melroy also took comfort in the fact that another astronaut, Douglas Wheelock, was watching over everything from the base of the solar wing.
