Space shuttle Endeavour and its crew prepare for their return to Earth after the spacecraft's final mission skyward.
Space shuttle Endeavour's
crew is wrapping up final preparations for its planned landing Wednesday
morning at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the space agency reported.
The crew is preparing to stow the Ku-Band antenna, used for high-data-rate
communications and television from space, and will sleep before the re-entry
sequence.
The astronauts on Endeavour
got a special wake-up call Monday to kick off a day devoted to preparing the
orbiter and its crew for their return to Earth this week. The wake-up call
featured the original composition "Dreams You Give" by Brain Plunkett, the
second-place winner in the Space Shuttle Program's Original Song Contest, which
drew more than 1,300 entries. More than a million votes were cast online by the
general public to choose two songs from among 10 finalists to be played to the
astronauts; the top vote-getter will be played to wake up the crew tomorrow.
At 8:06 p.m. EDT, all six
crew members will start their day talking about the flight in a series of
interviews with various major news outlets, and an hour later Commander
Mark Kelly, Pilot Greg Johnson and Flight Engineer Roberto Vittori will take
their places on Endeavour's flight deck and work with the entry flight-control
team on a routine pre-entry checkout of the shuttle's flight-control systems
and reaction-control system jets.
Most of the rest of the
crew's day will be spent packing items throughout the crew cabin in preparation
for the planned landing at the Kennedy Space Center Wednesday morning, the
space agency reported. The crew also took time for a tribute to Endeavour,
speaking about the history of the youngest space shuttle and the work
accomplished by its crews during its 25 trips to space.
Endeavour was NASA's fifth
and final space shuttle orbiter to join the fleet at Kennedy Space Center.
Endeavour also is known inside the space agency by its designation Orbiter
Vehicle-105, or OV-105. Construction of Endeavour began Sept. 28, 1987, and it
rolled out of the assembly plant in Palmdale, Calif., in April 1991. For the
first time, a national competition involving students in elementary and
secondary schools produced the name of the new orbiter.
After receiving 6,154
entries, representing more than 70,000 students, NASA chose Endeavour. The name
comes from a ship chartered to traverse the South Pacific in 1768 and captained
by 18th century British explorer James Cook, an experienced seaman, navigator
and amateur astronomer.
Among Endeavour's missions was
the first to include four spacewalks, and then the first to include five. Its
STS-67 mission set a length record of almost two full days longer than any
shuttle mission before it. Its airlock is the only one to have seen three spacewalkers
exit through it for a single spacewalk. And in its cargo bay, the first two
pieces of the International Space Station were joined together.
Nathan Eddy is Associate Editor, Midmarket, at eWEEK.com. Before joining eWEEK.com, Nate was a writer with ChannelWeb and he served as an editor at FierceMarkets. He is a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.
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