CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., May 22, 2009
Space Shuttle Waved Off From Landing
Stormy Florida Weather Postpones Return Of Atlantis Crew; NASA Aims For Saturday
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Space Shuttle Atlantis is backdropped by the blackness of space and the thin line of Earth's atmosphere Wednesday, May 20, 2009. (AP Photo/NASA)
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Play CBS Video Video Refurbished Hubble To Improve Space Images Repairs on the Hubble telescope were completed Monday, leaving the astronauts to begin inspecting Shuttle Atlantis for any damage. Bill Harwood, CBS News Space Consultant, discusses the mission.
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Video Hubble Repair Continues Today's spacewalk by the Shuttle Atlantis crew will give new gyroscopes to the aging Hubble guidance system, reports Daniel Sieberg.
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Video Fixing The Hubble Telescope Up in space, the Atlantis crew made a spectacular catch of the Hubble telescope. The crew aims to fix Hubble, which has been taking picture of far off galaxies for 19 years. Daniel Sieberg reports.
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Photo Essay Atlantis Mission STS-122 Space shuttle brought Europe's Columbus lab to the international space station.
Mission Control notified the astronauts Friday morning that the weather was too bad in Florida to bring them home.
Entry Flight Director Norm Knight threw in the towel shortly before 8 a.m., calling off a second attempt and retargeting landing for Saturday, said CBS News space analyst Bill Harwood.
"We're going to formally wave off for the day," astronaut Gregory H. Johnson called from mission control around 7:50 a.m. "The weather at [Kennedy Space Center] is quite unstable. KSC is no-go and forecast no-go with (rain) within 30 (nautical miles) and low ceilings and showers are consistently popping up offshore and over land."
NASA will try again Saturday to end the successful mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. The Atlantis astronauts will have four possible landing opportunities Saturday, two at the Kennedy Space Center and two at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., although no decision has been made as to whether Edwards would be used.
Flight controllers will aim for a touchdown in Florida, but the backup landing site in California will be available as well.
Space agency officials prefer a Florida touchdown because of the time and money - about $1.8 million - it takes to haul a shuttle across the country atop a modified jumbo jet.
The Florida forecast calls for a chance of showers Saturday and possibly low ceilings, If that holds up, and if conditions Sunday look promising, the shuttle mission could be extended one more day in hopes of getting Atlantis back to Kennedy. Otherwise, the crew likely would head for Edward on Saturday. But as of this writing, no decisions have been made.
The shuttle has enough supplies to stay up until Monday.
Atlantis blasted off May 11 on NASA's last trip to Hubble. The astronauts carried out five back-to-back spacewalks to fix and upgrade the 19-year-old observatory, now considered better than ever.
The repairs added five to 10 years to Hubble's working lifetime. Scientists hope to begin beaming back the results by early September.
One of the Hubble cameras that was replaced is returning to Earth aboard Atlantis, so it can be put on display at the Smithsonian Institution. A more powerful and sophisticated wide-field camera took its place.
The six men and one woman aboard Atlantis were the last humans to set eyes upon Hubble up-close. NASA plans no more satellite-servicing missions of this type, with the space telescope or anything else. That's because the shuttle is being retired next year. The replacement craft will essentially be a capsule to ferry astronauts back and forth to the International Space Station and, ultimately, the moon.
NASA considered this fifth and final Hubble repair mission so dangerous that, in 2004, a year after the Columbia tragedy, it was canceled. The space agency reinstated it two years later after putting a potential rescue mission in place and developing repair methods for astronauts in orbit.
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- There's a shuttle in space?
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- Why is NASA planning on going back to the moon?
Cut NASA budget. Let some of the other nations who will "benefit" from what is discovered help pay for this. - Reply to this comment
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