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Astronaut bringing test underwear back to Earth
(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-07-31 10:12

Good weather was forecast for Friday's late morning landing attempt, with the rain expected to hold off until afternoon at NASA's spaceport.

On Thursday afternoon, NASA cleared Endeavour to come home, after analyzing wing and nose images beamed down by the crew Wednesday in one final sweep for micrometeorite damage.

Astronaut bringing test underwear back to Earth
The Space Shuttle Endeavour is seen with a Soyuz spacecraft docked with the International Space Station in the foreground soon after the shuttle and station undocked in this NASA handout photo taken July 28, 2009. [Agencies]

"I'm ready to get back ... I think I have a landing in me, so don't want to get anybody on the ground worried about that," commander Mark Polansky told the AP.

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In one of NASA's longer shuttle flights, Polansky and his crew put a new addition onto the international space station, a porch for Japan's massive $1 billion lab, and freshened up the place with batteries, experiments and spare parts. They rocketed into space July 15.

Thursday marked Day 15 in space for Polansky and all but one of his crew. For Wakata, Thursday marked Day 137. He flew to the space station back in March, becoming the first person from Japan to live at the orbiting outpost.

Wakata said he's longing for sushi.

"That's the first thing that I'd like to have and also a hot spring in Japan sometime in the near future," Wakata told the AP.

Earlier in the day, the shuttle astronauts released a small canister containing a navigation and rendezvous experiment. It's actually two tiny satellites prepared by University of Texas and Texas A&M researchers. Five hours later, the crew launched an atmospheric density experiment, also a two-parter, so scientists can better understand how orbiting objects move and eventually come down.

Over at the space station, meanwhile, the major air-purifying system on the US side failed again, and the crew spent the day trying to fix the equipment. Engineers suspect a heating element is causing a short.

A carbon dioxide-removal system on the Russian side is still operating properly, and the six astronauts have backup methods for cleansing the cabin atmosphere. But the American system is crucial for long-term space station operations and needs to be repaired as soon as possible. It overheated over the weekend and shut down, but flight controllers managed to work around the problem, at least for a few days.