Houston, March 8 : Discovery, the world's most travelled spaceship, left the International Space Station for the last time on Monday, getting a dramatic send-off by the dozen orbiting astronauts. Station skipper Scott Kelly rang his ship's bell in true naval tradition, as the shuttle backed away on the final leg of its final journey. Discovery is due back on Earth on Wednesday.
After touchdown it will be retired and sent to the Smithsonian Institution for display. NASA's two other shuttles will join Discovery in retirement, following their upcoming missions. Discovery's astronauts got a special greeting in advance of their space station departure. Discovery will have racked up nearly 150 (m) million miles (241 (m) million kilometres) by trip's end, accumulated over 39 missions and nearly 27 years, and spent 365 days total in space. It flew to the space station 13 times.
Immediately after undocking high above the Pacific, Discovery performed a victory lap around the orbiting outpost, where it spent the past nine days. The two crews beamed down pictures of each other's vessel, with the blue cloud-specked planet 220 miles (354 kilometres) below as the backdrop. Live NASA TV footage showed Discovery as it flew over the Atlantic and the Sahara, and in a matter of a few minutes, over the Mediterranean and northern Italy. The two crews paid their own special tribute to Discovery, NASA's oldest surviving shuttle, during a joint farewell ceremony Sunday.
Discovery and its crew delivered a new storage compartment, as well as an equipment platform and the first humanoid robot in space. On the next shuttle flight, by Endeavour next month, a huge science experiment will be installed on the outside of the space station, wrapping up the US contributions. Atlantis will blast off with supplies on the final shuttle mission at the end of June. NASA is under presidential direction to focus more on outer space, beginning with expeditions to asteroids and then Mars.
American astronauts will continue hitching rides to the space station on Russian Soyuz spacecraft, at great expense. The intent is for private US companies to take over those ferry operations within a few years. Mission Control, meanwhile, monitored a piece of space junk, an old rocket part, that possibly was going to stray too close to the space station on Wednesday. Experts wanted to wait until after the shuttle's undocking, before deciding whether the complex needed to move out of harm's way. But it was looking less likely that it would pose a concern, officials said on Monday. AP
