Shuttle weathers anxious Florida landing

Endeavour touches down at Kennedy Space Center in Florida

February 22, 2000
Web posted at: 6:24 p.m. EST (2324 GMT)

In this story: New Mexico landing site considered Endeavour brings back 'crown jewels' RELATED STORIES, SITES

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Florida (CNN) -- The space shuttle Endeavour touched down in Florida on Tuesday, avoiding strong winds that had threatened to divert the landing to a backup site.

VIDEO Watch the shuttle as it touches down at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Real 28K 80K Windows Media 28K 80K     GALLERY The Earth in High-Res: Space shuttle topography images     WEATHER FORECASTS Cape Canaveral, Florida Edwards Air Force Base, Calif. White Sands, New Mexico     MESSAGE BOARD Space Shuttle     CHAT TRANSCRIPT A chat about the space shuttle Endeavor with Miles O'Brien

Wind conditions prevented the shuttle from landing at Kennedy Space Center during a first opportunity in the afternoon. But conditions cleared up enough within hours for Endeavour's crew to conclude their 11-day Earth mapping mission at KSC, the primary landing site for the shuttle program.

The poor weather prediction had prompted NASA to prepare a backup landing site at Edwards Air Force Base in California, where a shuttle has not touched down since 1996.

If inclement weather in California and Florida had delayed the landing until Wednesday or Thursday, NASA was ready to open an emergency runway in White Sands, New Mexico.

Endeavour's six astronauts ended their Earth-mapping work on Monday. Using sophisticated radar equipment aboard the orbiter and at the end of a 20-story radar mast, they mapped some 46 million square miles (119 million square km) of the planet's land formations.

The 330 digital cassettes aboard Endeavour carry enough radar imagery to fill more than 20,000 compact disks.

Scientists will spend one to two years turning them into the most detailed and comprehensive three-dimensional Earth maps ever made.

Perspective view of the area around Pasadena, California, just north of Los Angeles. The San Gabriel Mountains are seen across the top of the image. This image was created in part with data gathered by Shuttle Radar Topography Mission

Asked what would happen to the cassettes after the shuttle landed, project scientist Michael Kobrick said: "As fast as we can we're going to copy them. They're our crown jewels right now."

Only about 2 to 3 percent of Earth's topography has been mapped with the degree of resolution that NASA hopes to accomplish with this mission.

The multinational crew overcame two equipment problems while in orbit. On Monday, they spent two tense hours trying to fasten latches inside the canister that stores the radar mast after it retracts. On their fourth try, the astronauts secured the $35 million structure.

Last week, a stabilizing thruster at the mast's end malfunctioned and forced shuttle managers to tweak the fuel outlay so the mapping could continue.

The thruster trouble caused Endeavour to fall a bit short of the goal of mapping 80 percent of the Earth's landforms.

About 80,000 square miles (207,200 square kilometers) in scattered areas remained unimaged, most in North America and most already well-mapped by other methods.