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NASA decided early Monday to delay the landing of space shuttle Discovery to Tuesday due to cloudy weather.
NASA will then try to land Discovery and its seven-member crew at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) with the first opportunity at 5:08 AM EDT (09:08 GMT) and second at 6:43 AM EDT (10:43 GMT) on Tuesday. There will also be two landing opportunities at Edwards Air Force Base in California and two at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.
John Herrington, a crew member of the Endeavor mission in 2002,told Xinhua that cloudy weather could hinder Shuttle Commander Eileen Collins' manual control of the orbiter during its return to Earth. Moreover, possible rain could damage the insulation tiles of the space shuttle, he said.
Collins and the rest of the crew aboard Discovery will have to stay in space for another day, its 14th day in orbit.
"We've been working this pretty hard as I'm sure you can imagine from our silence down here. We just can't get comfortable with the stability of the situation for this particular opportunity so we are going to officially wave you off for 24 hours," Mission Control radioed Collins.
Discovery was originally scheduled to land at 4:47 AM EDT (08:47 GMT) on Monday, but cloudy weather forced NASA to postpone the landing by 90 minutes to 6:22 AM EDT (10:22 GMT). However, weather condition still did not get any better, so NASA had to put off Monday's scheduled return to earth.
NASA has made painstaking efforts to ensure the flight mission a complete success as the Discovery was the first space shuttle flight since the Columbia disaster on February 1, 2003.
A few minutes before its landing in Florida, the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated after the searing gases of re-entry melted its wounded wing. All seven astronauts aboard Columbia were killed.
Although NASA has announced that Discovery was fit to withstand the fiery descent into the Earth's atmosphere that brought the demise of Columbia, Discovery will be grounded with the rest of the fleet once it returns to Earth because the flight demonstrated that the US space agency had failed to fix the problem that doomed Columbia.
NASA has spent more than two years and US$1 billion to make safety upgrades of Discovery.
Discovery is returning home after a 13-day mission, during which they transferred more than 1.3 tons of much needed supplies and equipment to the International Space Station, and carried away about 2.3 tons of garbage dumped over the past more than two years.
The other prime task of the shuttle mission was to test the safety improvements NASA made since the 2003 Columbia disaster.
Discovery astronauts, Stephen Robinson and Soichi Noguchi, conducted three space walks during the mission.
(Xinhua News Agency August 9, 2005)
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