Weather may force shuttle to use emergency landing site

February 22, 2000
Web posted at: 1:11 a.m. EST (0611 GMT)

In this story: Crew reels in radar mast Maps will improve missile aim, troop deployment RELATED STORIES, SITES

From staff and wire reports

JOHNSON SPACE CENTER, Texas (CNN) -- An inclement weather forecast for Florida's Kennedy Space Center is forcing NASA to consider alternative landing sites for the orbiting shuttle Endeavour, including a site where a shuttle has landed only once before.

Endeavour, which completed an important radar mapping mission of the Earth's surface, has a three-day landing window beginning Tuesday at 4:52 p.m. EST (2152 GMT).

Possible touch down sites include the preferred site at Florida's Kennedy Space Center, the secondary site at Edwards Air Force Base in California, and the emergency site at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.

"Right now, the weather is somewhat questionable at the Kennedy Space Center all three days," said flight director John Shannon.

	GALLERY
The Earth in High-Res: Space shuttle topography images
	WEATHER FORECASTS
Cape Canaveral, Florida Edwards Air Force Base, Calif. White Sands, New Mexico

A high pressure system in the Atlantic Ocean was pushing stiff winds and a low cloud ceiling over the Florida landing site.

Tuesday's weather at the secondary landing site, Edwards Air Force Base in California, looked better, but was expected to worsen Wednesday and Thursday, forcing the possibility of landing at the emergency site at White Sands, where the last spacecraft to land there was the shuttle Columbia in 1982.

Endeavour has enough fuel and power to remain in orbit as late as Thursday, NASA said.

In all, 45 shuttle flights have touched down at Edwards Air Force Base. But since the last one in 1996, 20 consecutive mission have successfully landed at Kennedy Space Center, according to NASA.

After some difficulty, Endeavour's crew on Monday secured a 197-foot (60-meter) long radar mast inside the space shuttle. Had they been unsuccessful, the orbiter's crew may have been forced to jettison the $35 million structure before landing.

They reeled in the radar mast and antenna after concluding their map data collection. It took just over 19 minutes to fully retract the mast into a canister in the shuttle cargo bay.

Several latches initially failed to lock the lid on a canister holding the mast. But mission controllers managed to secure them after two hours of tense trouble shooting.

The problem did not affect the mapping mission, during which the astronauts at least 80 percent of the Earth's terrain at least twice. Double imaging is needed to create ultraprecise 3-D maps of the planet's peaks and valleys, as far north as Alaska and as far south as the tip of South America.

	CHAT TRANSCRIPT
A chat about the space shuttle Endeavor with Miles O'Brien

The mapping gathered enough geographic data to fill 20,600 compact discs.

"We'd like to congratulate you on a flawless operation of this most sophisticated mapping instrument in the universe," Mission Control told the astronauts after mapping ended, just before 7 a.m. EST.

"This topographic database will be a real treasure of the human race for many years."

The mission came up about 5 percentage points short of its original goal of mapping 80 percent of the Earth's land masses, since NASA reduced the mapping time by a full day before launching Endeavour on February 11.

It will take scientists one to two years to go through all the material the shuttle captured. NASA and its partner, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, expect the maps to be the most accurate ever produced.

The Defense Department will use the maps to improve its aim of missiles and its deployment of troops. Almost everyone else will have to settle for less precise data because of national security issues, but the information still will be far superior to what is currently available.

"There's every reason to be excited," said the mapping agency's Thomas Hennig.

A malfunctioning thruster on the end of the mast, the longest rigid structure ever flown in space, chopped 2.5 million square miles off of the area the shuttle was able to map. The crew managed to conserve enough fuel during the last week to permit mapping on Sunday.

CNN Space Correspondent Miles O'Brien and The Associated Press contributed to this report.