WASHINGTON (voa) – The U.S. Space Shuttle Columbia returns to Earth Tuesday, after an 11-day mission to renovate the Hubble Space Telescope.
Columbia is set to make a pre-dawn landing at Florida’s Kennedy Space Flight Center at 0932 universal time.
Mission commander Scott Altman says he and his six fellow astronauts are exhausted but exhilarated.
During their mission — one of the most complicated in U.S. space agency history — Colombia astronauts conducted five spacewalks to install new hardware on the Hubble Space Telescope.
They installed new electricity-generating solar panels and a new camera that is 10 times more powerful than the one it replaced.
Hubble has been in orbit since 1990 and has sent back priceless pictures and information about the solar system and distant galaxies.
During one spacewalk, the astronauts had to completely power-down the space telescope for the first time in orbit, with no guarantee they could completely restore electricity.
This would have brought a premature end to the Hubble project. But power was restored and the space agency says the telescope is working perfectly.
