14 DAY TRIAL // The seven astronauts who returned home on Saturday aboard the Discovery space shuttle are some of the happiest men and women on the planet right now. After a mission laden with dangers and risks, they managed to last for 13 days in space, while at the same time delivering a new set of solar wings to the International Space Station. They also brought back colleague Sandra Magnus, who, after 134 days of weightlessness, now again learns to experience gravity.
And their excitement is not in the wrong place, one might say. The iconic STS-119 flight saw the completion of the international facility, and, with the new set of solar panels fully deployed, it is now the largest man-made structure in space. The additions have increased the power output to the ISS by more than 25 percent, to an amount NASA compares with that used by 42 average households. Thanks to these changes, the station is now able to house a permanent six-member crew, and it will begin doing so starting late May.
After touching down at 3:13 pm EDT (1913 GMT), the astronauts expressed their deepest feelings of relief that the difficult flight was over, but also the satisfaction at a job well done. As they undocked from ISS' hatch last Wednesday, they were able to finally get a bird's-eye view of their own work, the fully-symmetrical orbital lab, completed with four sets of solar wings. The first pictures of the completed station were made available on NASA TV as soon as the space flyers saw it.
“It was just an amazing view. I just had to look out the window and take it all it. It was just fabulous,” Discovery's pilot Dominic “Tony” Antonelli said during a news briefing. “It was really a sight to see,” the shuttle's commander for the mission, Lee Archambault, added. All in all, the ISS is now approximately the size of a football field, with a few more modules waiting to be added until the shuttle fleet is withdrawn from active duty, in 2010.
“When the President of the United States takes time out of his day to show interest in what you're doing, no matter who you are or what you are, it's very humbling. It was [a] very, very nice surprise,” Archambault concluded and also added that he and his crew had been honored to receive such an important call from Barack Obama himself.