{"id":295835,"date":"2011-03-09T16:01:43","date_gmt":"2011-03-09T16:01:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ghanamma.net\/2011\/03\/09\/discovery-set-for-final-landing\/"},"modified":"2011-03-09T16:01:43","modified_gmt":"2011-03-09T16:01:43","slug":"discovery-set-for-final-landing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2011\/03\/09\/discovery-set-for-final-landing\/","title":{"rendered":"Discovery set for final landing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><div readability=\"98.45934234\">\n        \t\t  <span><br \/>\n    <span>9 March 2011<\/span><br \/>\n<span>Last updated at <\/span><span>11:00 ET<\/span><br \/>\n<\/span><\/p>\n<p>\t\t\t\t\t            \t    \t\t \t\t\t<span><br \/>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<span>By Jonathan Amos<\/span><br \/>\n\t\t\t\t<span>Science correspondent, BBC News <\/span><br \/>\n\t\t\t<\/span><\/p>\n<p>America&#8217;s most experienced space shuttle, Discovery, is about to close its remarkable 27-year career.<\/p>\n<p>The orbiter has fired its thrusters to bring itself out of the sky and into a glide path towards the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.<\/p>\n<p>Discovery is destined for a museum on its return &#8211; Nasa is retiring its three remaining reusable spaceplanes.<\/p>\n<p>The &#8220;leader of the fleet&#8221; has been on a 12-day mission to the International Space Station (ISS).<\/p>\n<p>Duties have included delivering a new store room and a sophisticated humanoid robot.  <\/p>\n<p>  <!--  Embedding the audio player --><br \/>\n<!--  This is the embedded player component --><\/p>\n<div>\n<div>\n<div readability=\"7\">\n                                <img decoding=\"async\" class=\"holding\" src=\"http:\/\/www.ghanamma.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/27a7a7c5011363615-1.jpg.jpg\" alt=\"Space shuttle Discovery lifts off from launch pad \" \/><\/p>\n<p><strong>Please turn on JavaScript.<\/strong> Media requires JavaScript to play.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p>        <!-- embedding script --><\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p><!-- end of the embedded player component --><\/p>\n<p><!-- Player embedded -->      <\/p>\n<p>The ship&#8217;s crew also performed two spacewalks to carry out maintenance tasks on the exterior of the platform.<\/p>\n<p>The landing at KSC is timed to occur just before midday local Florida time (1657 GMT).<\/p>\n<p>Within hours of Discovery&#8217;s touchdown, Nasa will turn its attention to shuttle Endeavour.<\/p>\n<p>It will roll out of Kennedy&#8217;s vast Vehicle Assembly Building to go to the launch pad in preparation for its final voyage into space next month.<\/p>\n<p>The Atlantis orbiter will close the shuttle programme with a flight in June or just beyond.<\/p>\n<div>\n\t<a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/science-environment-12688254#story_continues_2\">Continue reading the main story<\/a>\t\t<\/p>\n<h2>DISCOVERY: FLEET LEADER<\/h2>\n<p>\t\t<!-- pullout-items--><\/p>\n<p>\t<!-- pullout-body--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li> It is named after various historic vessels, including James Cook&#8217;s 18th Century explorer <\/li>\n<li> Discovery was the first spacecraft to retrieve a satellite and bring it back to Earth<\/li>\n<li> It has completed more missions than any other vehicle in the space shuttle fleet<\/li>\n<li> The shuttle visited both the Russian Mir station and the International Space Station <\/li>\n<li> It carried the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit and made two servicing missions<\/li>\n<li> The ship&#8217;s total in-orbit time is 364 days; and has travelled more than 230m km<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><!-- pullout-links--><\/div>\n<p>The plan then is for US astronauts to be transported to the ISS on Russian Soyuz rockets, perhaps until the middle of the decade.<\/p>\n<p>A number of American companies should be in a position by that stage to sell launch services to Nasa on a range of new vehicles.<\/p>\n<p>Such matters though are secondary on what is surely to be a day of high emotion.<\/p>\n<p>Eileen Collins was the first woman to pilot a shuttle and commanded Discovery in 2005 on the &#8220;return to flight&#8221; mission after the Columbia accident.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The shuttle-in-general&#8217;s biggest achievement, I believe, was building the International Space Station, which is pretty much 99% complete &#8211; and Discovery was part of doing that,&#8221; she told BBC News.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;But also Discovery took up the Hubble Space Telescope and also visited the Mir space station, and did many satellite deploys and spacelab missions prior to the space station.  <\/p>\n<p>&#8220;When you look at the shuttle programme as a whole, we have learned not only to fly space shuttles to low-Earth orbit and re-use them, but we&#8217;ve learned about the environment of space and how to make future spacecraft better through the mistakes that were made in the shuttle programme.  So overall I think the shuttle was a huge success.&#8221;      <\/p>\n<p>Endeavour&#8217;s scheduled lift-off date is 19 April.  It will deliver a flagship scientific experiment to the ISS known as the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS).<\/p>\n<p>This seven-tonne instrument will sit on the platform&#8217;s truss, or backbone, to conduct a survey of cosmic rays.<\/p>\n<p>Researchers hope this study will reveal new insights into the make-up and origin of the Universe.<\/p>\n<p>Endeavour will be commanded by astronaut Mark Kelly, whose wife, Congresswoman Gaby Giffords, is still recovering from a bullet wound to the head sustained during an assassination attempt in January.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.ghanamma.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/27a7a7c5011363615-1.jpg-150x150.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p>See more here:<br \/>\n<a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/go\/rss\/int\/news\/-\/news\/science-environment-12688254\" title=\"Discovery set for final landing\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Discovery set for final landing<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p> 9 March 2011 Last updated at 11:00 ET By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News America&#8217;s most experienced space shuttle, Discovery, is about to close its remarkable 27-year career. The orbiter has fired its thrusters to bring itself out of the sky and into a glide path towards the Kennedy Space Center in Florida<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-295835","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.0 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Discovery set for final landing - Ghanamma.com<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2011\/03\/09\/discovery-set-for-final-landing\/\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:title\" content=\"Discovery set for final landing - Ghanamma.com\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:description\" content=\"9 March 2011 Last updated at 11:00 ET By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News America&#039;s most experienced space shuttle, Discovery, is about to close its remarkable 27-year career. 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