SPACE WIRE
US space shuttle lands in Florida
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (AFP) Dec 07, 2002
The US space shuttle Endeavour landed here Saturday after bad weather prevented it from returning from its mission to the International Space Station (ISS) on three earlier attempts .

The picture-perfect landing at 2:37 pm (1937 GMT) came after Mission Control at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas postponed the scheduled Friday arrival due to "thick clouds and low ceilings" around the landing cite.

The shuttle separated from the ISS on December 2 over northwestern Australia, but missed three landing "windows" because of bad weather.

With the shuttle running low on fuel, NASA had decided to ready Edwards Air Force Base in California as a possible alternate landing site Saturday in the event the weather in Florida did not improve, mission control said.

Endeavour blasted off from Cape Canaveral for the ISS on November 23 on a multi-purpose, 11-day mission.

It ferried up a three-man US-Russian replacement crew destined for a four-month stint aboard the station, and brought home the old crew.

The shuttle brought up more than a ton of new equipment, fresh supplies and gear for scientific experiments.

It also brought back a malfunctioning sealed container known as the Microgravity Science Glovebox, which has built-in gloves that provides an enclosed work space for research in the station's unique, low-gravity environment.

The shuttle's four-man crew, in three spacewalks, performed a series of external construction tasks designed to enlarge the solar-panel grid that powers the station's sophisticated climate control system.

They also placed into orbit two miniature satellites as part of an experiment for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, NASA said.

The shuttle returned with commander Jim Wetherbee, co-pilot Paul Lockhart, astronauts Michael Lopez-Alegria and John Herrington, along with the ISS' former crew: Russian commander Valery Korzun, American Peggy Whitson and cosmonaut Sergei Treschev.

The station's new crew members are Americans Kenneth Bowersox and Donald Pettit, and Russian Nikolai Budarin.

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