Astronaut's Return Comes With a View

Nov 06, 03:24 PM

Current Headlines: By John Ferak, Omaha World-Herald, Neb.

Nov. 6--After being in orbit for five months, Nebraska astronaut Clayton Anderson will get a sky-high view of his native state Wednesday as the space shuttle Discovery brings him home.

NASA said the preliminary weather forecast looked good for the early afternoon touchdown at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Anderson, an Ashland native and 1977 graduate of Ashland-Greenwood High School, is aboard. Since June, Nebraska's first native-born astronaut has been serving as flight engineer on the International Space Station.

The scheduled flight path for Discovery will include an early morning pass visible in central Nebraska, including the North Platte area, said Rob Lazaro, public affairs specialist for NASA.

Discovery is scheduled to fly over the state from the northwest to southeast at approximately 5:26 a.m. CST, Lazaro said.

That pass, at more than 16,000 mph, may be visible to those on the ground depending on the weather. It will last no more than 10 minutes, Lazaro said.

Lazaro said the flight over Anderson's home state was purely coincidental.

"It's just pretty fortunate that the descent has worked out that way."

The shuttle begins its final descent for landing about an hour before its scheduled 12:01 p.m. CST touchdown in Florida.

That final approach will cross over Nebraska, but the shuttle will not be visible in the daylight, Lazaro said.

Wednesday will be the first time a space shuttle has crossed the central region of the United States since the disintegration of the shuttle Columbia in 2003, Lazaro said.

Middle school students from Ashland-Greenwood plan to take a field trip to the Strategic Air & Space Museum to watch the televised landing, school officials said today.

The museum, located three miles outside of Ashland, is displaying a special exhibit, "Clayton Anderson: Heartland Astronaut."

Several of Anderson's relatives, including his mother, Alice Anderson, plan to be in Florida for the shuttle's landing. Alice Anderson is a retired Ashland-Greenwood school employee who lives in Ashland.

The landing originally was scheduled before dawn, but shuttle commander Pamela Melroy said she asked Mission Control to switch it to daylight to make it easier on herself and her crew.

The schedule change also allowed the seven astronauts to shift their sleep time later instead of earlier, she said in an interview with the Associated Press.

This 15-day mission is longer than most -- and more stressful, too, with the astronauts required to carry out repairs to a torn solar energy panel at the space station.

Melroy said she was "extremely concerned" when spacewalker Scott Parazynski went outside to work on the ripped wing Saturday.

"You may have heard me at one point kind of squeak out 'Be careful' as I saw the solar array coming toward him," she told the AP. "But I got more comfortable because I was watching him very closely . . . and he was using good body position and hand techniques."

She also took comfort in the fact that another astronaut, Douglas Wheelock, was watching over everything from the base of the solar wing.

Parazynski said that he barely managed to reach the wing's snagged wires and cut them.

"Another foot beyond that and I don't think we could have reached it," he said. "If it had been any farther away, it would have been a Plan B or C or D. I don't know what it would have been."

After leaving the space station on Monday, the astronauts used a laser- and camera-tipped boom to hunt for possible micrometeorite damage to the shuttle's wing and nose that might have occurred during the 11 days the shuttle was docked to the orbiting outpost.

NASA was finishing up its analysis of the latest laser data and expected to let the astronauts know later today if they are cleared for landing.

Because of the schedule switch to a daytime landing, Discovery will make the first coast-to-coast re-entry since Columbia disintegrated over Texas in 2003.

Discovery's original landing plan called for the ship to glide up from the southwest over Central America and the Caribbean before landing in Florida. But now the shuttle will descend over the Pacific Northwest and all the way across the country.

The astronauts woke up this morning to Deep Purple's "Space Trucking," played for Anderson.

"You know they say all great things have to come to an end, and I'm really sorry that I have to agree with that for now, but I had an awesome ride with several awesome crews," Anderson said.

Anderson said he's looking forward to ice-cold drinks and ice cream, which are unavailable on the space station.

This report includes material from the Associated Press.

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