NASA forecasters expect near-perfect weather for a touchdown at the Kennedy Space Center at 6:04 p.m. EST on Monday. Endeavour spent one week docked to the International Space Station Alpha, delivering a 240-foot-long set of solar arrays and a power module that in effect quadrupled the station's power supply. One American astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts are currently in their second month of permanence aboard Alpha and are scheduled to work there until late February.
On Sunday afternoon, Endeavour's crewmembers took time to answer questions during a televised interview with reporters. "When we did the fly-around and got a chance to see the deployed arrays and radiators and how much the station had grown during our visit was just a tremendous sense of satisfaction for me," said mission specialist Carlos Noriega.
Endeavour commander Brent Jett said he took particular satisfaction in spending time with his good friends living on Alpha and sharing a meal with them.
"We were able to do a lot of productive work with them and I know it helped them out a lot," Jett said. "That gave us all, I think, a good feeling as we left."
Noriega said he was impressed by how tidy the Alpha crew is keeping the station's interior. The noise level aboard the station isn't that loud either, he said.
"You can hear some fan if you choose to listen to it ... after a while you just don't even notice it," Noriega said. "It's a little louder than what we have here on the shuttle. I didn't find it to be really too bad."
Noriega and colleague Joe Tanner went on three spacewalks outside the station to help set up the solar wings, fix them, and prepare the outpost for the arrival of the next station's module next month. "I'm in a pure joy mode right now," Tanner said. But he added that he expects that sensation will be gone in a few days. "When I realize that it's all over, there will be a bit of a letdown, because we have poured so much into it," he said.
The next shuttle mission is scheduled for Jan. 18. Five astronauts will fly aboard Atlantis to deliver and attach a 32,000-pound NASA module to Alpha. Called 'Destiny', the chamber will serve as a research laboratory for scientific and technological experiments.
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