Houston – Atlantis was cleared Saturday to return to Earth this week after the space shuttle’s heat shield was judged capable of surviving the intense heat of re- entry, and a U.S. astronaut reached a milestone with the longest single spaceflight by any woman.
Atlantis is set to land at Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Thursday, although NASA officials were still deciding whether to keep the shuttle at the international space station for an extra day because of a failure of computers that control the station’s orientation and oxygen production.
“That’s great news,” Atlantis commander Rick Sturckow said of the landing plan.
Russian cosmonauts struggled Saturday to complete the restoration of the computers.
The shuttle’s 11-day space station construction mission had already been extended to 13 days so a thermal-protection blanket could be fixed during an unscheduled spacewalk. NASA has been particularly sensitive about the space shuttles’ heat shields since the Columbia accident killed seven astronauts in 2003.
Also Saturday, U.S. astronaut Sunita “Suni” Williams set a record for the longest single spaceflight by any woman. Williams, who has lived at the space station since December, surpassed by a day the record of 188 days set by astronaut Shannon Lucid at the Mir space station in 1996.
“It’s just that I’m in the right place at the right time,” Williams, 41, said when Mission Control in Houston congratulated her.
