14 DAY TRIAL // After 8 days of joint missions with the three-member crew of the ISS, the Discovery space shuttle has undocked from the International Space Station yesterday, on its way towards its Saturday landing at the Kennedy Space Center, in Florida. The most crucial phase of the STS-119 mission has thus been completed, and all that remains is for the shuttle to return safely home, whilst conducting another experiment upon reentry.
The separation of the two crafts occurred at precisely 3:53 pm EDT (1953 GMT), in a smooth procedure. The maneuver took place at an altitude of about 216 miles (347 kilometers), while the ships were flying high above the Indian Ocean. Upon more than a week of missions, the 10 astronauts parted ways, after the last one installed a new set of solar wings on the ISS and replaced NASA flight engineer Sandra Magnus with JAXA astronaut Koichi Wakata.
“You look clean and dry. What a beautiful sight,” ISS commander Michael Fincke told the Discovery crew, as the two vessels passed over Houston. “We're very proud to have left the space station with more power,” Lee Archambault, the commander of the space shuttle, said to the ISS crew before the hatch between the two teams was closed and hermetically sealed.
“I'd like to say thank you and your crew for an outstanding mission. You made the space station much better than it was before. You gave it more power and symmetry, which is not to be underrated,” Fincke told Archambault right before leaving. Indeed, the new solar arrays, which were successfully unfurled last Friday, have boosted ISS' capabilities by more than 25 percent, and now ensure that a larger, six-member crew can be stationed at the lab permanently.
After the two were separated, Discovery took a “tour” of the completed space station, and the astronauts snapped the first photos of their accomplishment. NASA has just recently made these pictures available, as captions from the shuttle's cameras. “It's been a very memorable time up here, and I guess I'm leaving with a sense of satisfaction that we did get so much done,” Magnus shared right before leaving the ISS, which she called home for more than 4 months.