Astronauts prepare to land shuttle in Florida
(Updates with quotes; changes dateline from Houston, byline)
By Irene Klotz
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., March 26 (Reuters) - The shuttle Endeavour astronauts packed gear and turned off equipment on Wednesday to prepare for a homecoming in Florida after delivering a Japanese storage room and a Canadian robot to the International Space Station.
Touchdown at the Kennedy Space Center was targeted for 7:05 p.m. EDT (2305 GMT), just 33 minutes before sundown.
"This has been a two-week adventure and it's been a pleasure and honor to be on it," Endeavour pilot Greg Johnson radioed to Mission Control in Houston after the crew's wake-up call on Wednesday. "In a bittersweet way, we're ready to get home."
NASA expected no problems from the weather, with clear skies and light winds forecast at the seaside spaceport. A handful of technical glitches that surfaced during Endeavour's 16-day flight, including a tiny nick in one of the cockpit windows, likewise was not expected to be an issue for landing, said flight director Richard Jones.
Endeavour returns with French astronaut Leopold Eyharts, who spent seven weeks aboard the station setting up Europe's new Columbus laboratory.
His stay was shorter than planned due to delays launching NASA's last shuttle mission, which carried the lab and Eyharts into orbit. Originally scheduled to fly in December, Atlantis ended up flying in February.
In an interview Tuesday evening, Eyharts said his time aboard the station was jam-packed and though he would have liked to stay longer, he was ready to come home.
"It was very tiring," he said. "So I am happy to come back."
Eyharts' replacement, NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman, will serve as the station's flight engineer until shuttle Discovery flies to the outpost in May with the main part of Japan's tour-bus-sized laboratory, Kibo. A storage room filled with equipment for Kibo was one of the primary payloads aboard Endeavour, which spent 12 days at the station.
The module's installation finally gave Japan a presence on the station and meant that all 15 partner nations are represented on the $100 billion outpost, now 70 percent complete.
The visiting shuttle crew also assembled a Canadian-made maintenance robot named Dextre that extended the station's crane by 30 feet (9 metres) and added almost a human touch for handling objects as small as a phone book. NASA wanted the $209 million robot to cut down the amount of time needed for risky spacewalks to maintain the station.
NASA plans 10 more shuttle missions to construct and supply the station before the space shuttle fleet is retired in 2010. It also has a shuttle mission scheduled this year to upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope. (Editing by Jane Sutton and Doina Chiacu)
(jane.sutton@reuters.com; +1 305 810 2688; Reuters Messaging: jane.sutton.reuters.com@reuters.net)
