Space Center, Houston – Discovery’s astronauts lowered a huge container filled with a 2 1/2-year backlog of space-station trash and old broken equipment into the shuttle Friday for return to Earth early Monday.
It was their biggest task of the day, coming just one day after NASA cleared Discovery to come home and one day before their departure from the international space station.
The contents of the cargo container, which was slowly anchored into the shuttle’s payload bay by a robot arm, will be either junked once it’s back on Earth or returned to engineers for analysis.
The astronauts’ other task Friday was to put away the inspection boom that they used to survey their spaceship.
Much of the packing work was tedious and time-consuming. At one point, astronauts asked Mission Control what they should do with a piece of white foam that wouldn’t fit into a bag.
“We see it well, and we concur. It is not tiny,” Mission Control’s Steve Frick said after looking at the material over a video link. He later told the crew it could cut the foam to make it fit.
Another call from Mission Control went unanswered for a few minutes as the astronauts worked.
“Sorry to ignore you,” astronaut Stephen Robinson radioed as the crew secured items in large white bags. “We all have our heads down in bags.”
The amount of trash being removed was larger than usual because of the 2 1/2-year gap in shuttle flights after the Columbia disaster.
The space station has had to rely on much smaller Russian cargo ships for restocking and a limited amount of trash removal.
Friday’s activity came a day after NASA gave the all-clear for Discovery to return to Earth, concluding that there was no need to send the astronauts out on another spacewalk to repair a torn thermal blanket near a cockpit window.
Mission managers could not guarantee that a piece of the blanket wouldn’t rip and slam into the spacecraft during re-entry but said the chances were slim.
It would have been the second time during Discovery’s 13-day mission that astronauts were called on to repair their spacecraft’s thermal protection shield.
