HOUSTON - Atlantis was cleared Saturday to return
to Earth this coming week after the space shuttle's heat shield was judged
capable of surviving the intense heat of re-entry, and a US astronaut reached a
milestone with the longest single spaceflight by any woman.
Atlantis is set to land at Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Thursday, although NASA
officials were still deciding whether to keep the shuttle at the international
space station for an extra day because of a failure of computers that control
the station's orientation and oxygen production.
"That's great news," Atlantis commander Rick Sturckow said of the landing
plan.
nternational Space Station Mission Specialist Suni Williams
gathers her sports memorabilia from inside the Destiny module as
she prepares to return to earth after setting the record for the longest-duration single
spaceflight by a woman June 16, 2007. [Reuters]
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The shuttle's 11-day space station construction mission had already been
extended to 13 days so a thermal-protection blanket could be fixed during an
unscheduled spacewalk. NASA has been particularly sensitive about the space
shuttles' heat shields since the Columbia accident killed seven astronauts in
2003.
Also Saturday, US astronaut Sunita "Suni" Williams set a record for the
longest single spaceflight by any woman. Williams, who has lived at the space
station since December, surpassed the record of 188 days set by astronaut
Shannon Lucid at the Mir space station in 1996.
"It's just that I'm in the right place at the right time," Williams, 41, said
when Mission Control in Houston congratulated her on the record. "Even when the
station has little problems, it's just a beautiful, wonderful place to live."
Those "little problems" had been considerable in recent days with the
computer system failure on the Russian side of the station. Russian cosmonauts
Fyodor Yurchikhin and Oleg Kotov got four of six processors on two computers
working again on Friday, and on Saturday they got the remaining two on line.
Engineers in Moscow and Houston had not yet conclusively determined what
caused the failure, although the leading theory was changes to the electrical
system from the space station's growth.
The cosmonauts started turning on systems -- such as an oxygen machine,
a water processor and a carbon dioxide remover -- that had been turned off
while the computers were down. On Sunday, they planned to test the station's
orientation system, which will be the final benchmark for deciding whether the
computers work properly and whether the shuttle needs to stay an extra day.
"The bottom line is it appears that the command and control type computers
are functioning just fine," said Mike Suffredini, NASA's space station program
manager.
In preparation for Tuesday's scheduled undocking of the shuttle, astronauts
and cosmonauts spent Saturday moving supplies and trash between the shuttle and
station after several days of grueling work.
Friday's tasks had included spacewalks to repair the torn thermal blanket on
Atlantis and to retract a 115-foot solar energy wing that will be moved to a
different location on the space station.
Williams' former crew mate at the space station, astronaut Michael
Lopez-Alegria, holds the US record for longest continuous stay in space with 215
days. The longest stay in space was 437 days by Russian Valeri Polyakov.
In February, Williams set another record for the most time spent spacewalking
by a woman, kicking off a year of achievements by women in space.
In October, US astronaut Peggy Whitson will become the first woman to command
the space station. Later that month, Air Force Col. Pam Melroy will become only
the second woman to command a space shuttle mission; Eileen Collins was the
first, in 1999.
If Whitson and Melroy's time at the space station overlap, it could be the
first time there are two female commanders in space at the same time. "The first
time we have two female commanders in orbit -- that will be neat," Whitson said.
Almost three decades after the first women joined the astronaut corps in
1978, only 17 of the 94 current active astronauts are women.
Lucid says part of the problem may be the pipeline that delivers pilots to
the astronaut corps -- the US military. Women didn't start entering the
military service academies until the late 1970s.
"I think it's really great that all of this happening, but obviously, you
wonder, why did it take so many years?" asked Lucid, who is in astronaut office
management. "At some point, you would like the field to be such that it doesn't
make any difference whether you're male or female."
On the ground, Mission Control had its first female flight director in 1985.
All three space station flight directors working the current Atlantis mission,
and the lead shuttle flight director, are women. Women make up about a third of
NASA's 33 flight directors, who are responsible for running the spaceflight
missions.
"So many times, the room is filled with female flight controllers," Lucid
said. "I just think it's just a wonderful thing that people are getting the
chance to do what they're capable of doing."