By Xinhua
Washington : After a two-month delay, U.S. space shuttle Atlantis finally blasted off on Thursday from the Kennedy Space Center, Florida, on a mission to deliver the European Space Agency’s Columbus Laboratory to the International Space Station (ISS).
The shuttle, on a mission coded STS-122, lifted off at 2:45 p.m. EST (1945 GMT) after weather threats retreated. Two minutes and five seconds after liftoff, the twin solid rocket boosters assisting Atlantis’ launch into space separated as planned from the shuttle’s external tank and fell back toward the Atlantic Ocean, the NASA TV said.
At about 2:57 p.m. EST (1957 GMT), the STS-122 astronauts aboard the space shuttle discarded the 15-story external tank that fed the orbiter’s nearly nine-minute launch into space.
With the tank jettisoned, Atlantis is now in orbit. STS-122 commander Stephen N. Frick will maneuver the shuttle to allow his fellow astronaut crewmembers to take detailed videos and still images of its external tank. Analysts at Mission Control in Houston’s Johnson Space Center will search for any signs of foam loss during launch.
Frick, who commands the seven-member crew, is a veteran space flier. Alan G. Poindexter serves as pilot. Mission specialists include Rex J. Walheim, Stanley G. Love, Leland D. Melvin, and European Space Agency astronauts Hans Schlegel and Leopold Eyharts. Poindexter, Love and Melvin are making their first space flight.
Atlantis, the 100-ton orbiter, is scheduled to dock with the ISS on Saturday. It will ferry the Columbus lab to the space station, where astronauts plan to install it during their 11-day mission. Three spacewalks are scheduled during the mission.
The high-tech, 10.3-ton cylinder, which costs 2 billion U.S. dollars, will be as big as a small bus and keep European astronauts busy for at least seven years with space-based experiments.
“It’s extremely important after 12 years of working on the (Columbus module) program to have something that gets launched,” said Alan Thirkettle, ISS program manager for the European Space Agency. “We’ll own a part of the station, we’ll have the rights to have our astronauts flying on there … to be icons for youth of the future in Europe.”
Thirkettle explained that the module’s on-orbit experiments are expected to help develop new medicine, materials and water treatment techniques.
Thursday is undoubtedly a big day for Shuttle Atlantis, considering the repeated delays of its launching which was first scheduled for Dec. 6, 2007.
Faulty fuel gauges have forced the NASA to abort previous scheduled launches. A team of NASA engineers worked round the clock and through the holidays to fix the problem, which turned out to be a bad connector in the external tank.
The hard works paid off because all four fuel gauges checked out fine as the countdown entered its final few hours for Thursday’s liftoff.
The fuel gauges are said to be part of a critical system to ensure the safety of the main engines of the shuttle during its nine-minute launch into space.
“Everything looks real good out there,” STS-122 launch director said prior to the launching. “We have a good system and we’re ready to go fly.”
Everything looked real good except the weather, which had once threatened to delay the launching again on Thursday afternoon.
Weather forecasters at Cape Canaveral, where the Kennedy Space Center is located, said earlier Thursday there was a 70 percent chance of unfavorable weather conditions, such as clouds and rain, at the planned time of the launch.
As the countdown to the launch entered the final hour on Thursday afternoon, NASA indicated that weather conditions became good enough to provide a 10-minute window for launching.