The space shuttle Atlantis touched down safely at Edwards Air Force base in California’s Mojave Desert on Sunday morning.
Atlantis circled Earth 197 times and traveled 5.3 million miles before ending a 13-day mission to refurbish the Hubble Space Telescope. Atlantis landed at 9:39 a.m. MDT. Its return had been diverted to Southern California after nasty weather prevented a landing at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Alan Brown, a NASA spokesman at the Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards, said the crew accomplished major repairs of the telescope and extended its lifetime through at least 2014.
The crew replaced one wide- field camera, swapped several batteries, installed a cosmic origins spectrograph and placed stainless-steel “blankets” over the telescope, among other upgrades and repairs, Brown said.
The mission cost about $1 billion, according to NASA officials. It will cost an additional $1.8 million to ferry the shuttle to Florida on the back of a modified Boeing 747.
