Saturday, March 28, 2009

Discovery Lands at Kennedy Space Center

Discovery touchesdown on Runway 15 at KSC today. (NASA)

The space shuttle Discovery dropped out of earth orbit today and glided to a beautiful landing here at the Kennedy Space Center following 13 days in space - of which eight of those were docked with the international space station.

Discovery dropped through cloud layers and flew through 20 mph winds as she cut a path across central Florida beginning south of Tampa Bay at 3:05 pm ET. Nine minutes later - at 3:13:17 pm ET - Discovery's main gear slammed runway 15 moving at about 220 mph. A drag chute then was deployed, slowing the orbiter down and putting less stress on her brak
es as she slowed to land the nose gear seconds later.



"Welcome home Discovery after a great mission to bring the international space station to full power," stated Mission Control after Discovery came to a stop. "A special welcome home to Sandy after living and working on board ISS as a member of Expedition 18 and to the entire crew of STS-119. Great job everybody."

Wheels stop occurred at 2:14:45 pm, at a mission elapsed time of 12 days, 19 hours, 39 minutes and 1 second. Discovery traveled 5.3 million miles on her 36th voyage into space.

1 comment:

Denise said...

I live in Orlando Florida and the twin sonic booms were wonderful and scared all the dogs! I watched the landing on TV and it was beautiful, just beautiful!

 
copyright 1998 - 2010 Charles Atkeison, SpaceLaunchNews.com. All rights reserved.