Washington, Aug 19 (DPA) Space shuttle Endeavour will end its mission a day earlier than scheduled and land Tuesday, managers at the US space agency NASA announced.
NASA officials had already cut short a spacewalk by two hours Saturday while the decision was being weighed.
Powerful Hurricane Dean is currently churning through the Caribbean Sea towards the Gulf of Mexico and could threaten NASA’s mission control in Texas. The earlier landing simplifies the evacuation of the Johnson Space Centre in Houston, if necessary.
Astronauts now plan to decouple Endeavour from the orbiting International Space Station (ISS) around 1200 GMT Sunday, fly back to earth and land Tuesday at NASA’s Kennedy Space Centre on Cape Canaveral, Florida.
The shuttle was previously scheduled to undock Monday from the ISS and land Wednesday in Florida.
The shorter spacewalk allowed the Endeavour crew extra time to prepare for the now-planned return to earth Tuesday, instead of Wednesday. The hatch to the ISS was closed Saturday.
Endeavour astronaut Dave Williams and ISS flight engineer Clay Anderson knew at the start of Saturday’s manoeuvre that they would lose the last two hours of the spacewalk. Despite the shorter time outside the spacecraft, they were still able to replace antennae on the outside of the ISS and completed other planned construction work during the fourth and final spacewalk of the Endeavour mission.
Earlier in the mission, the discovery of a gash in the underside of Endeavour led to extensive engineering deliberations before NASA decided against using a spacewalk to make in-flight repairs.
The damage inflicted in the spacecraft’s heat-shielding ceramic tiles by falling debris on lift-off on Aug 8 was deemed not to be a danger to Endeavour’s re-entry.
Undetected damage to the shuttle Columbia’s heat shield had caused its destruction on re-entry in February 2002.