Update: Discovery landed this morning right on time and everything went smoothly. The crew is now off the Orbiter and the long process of inspection has begun.
Just a couple of quick notes to start the morning:
- As I write this (Sunday night) the Space Shuttle is due to land at Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 6:14 Pacific Time (13:14 Greenwich). They close the hatch (really, the payload bay doors) around 2:00 a.m. Pacific, fire the engines up 3 hours later, and in only and hour from then they’ll be home– if it doesn’t rain on the landing site, in which case they’ll scrub the attempt (actually, they won’t even deorbit if there’s a significant chance of rain). There were some troubles on the mission: one of their auxiliary power units which powers the hydraulics– needed to brake upon landing – gave them some grief. However, there are two backup units, so it shouldn’t be too big a worry. I suppose I’ll know when I wake in the morning, so I’ll post again when I have more info.
- You might have noticed the blog format changed again. I listened to the comments folks made when I moved the blog to the mainpage, the most common and important complaint being that the menu disappeared. Well, I tried to add one to the layout template (called a “theme”) I was using and it was a nightmare. And the final straw, too: I had been having lots of trouble using the code in that theme. So I searched for three-column themes, found one that was close to what I liked, and spent all day hacking it. It was fun, actually! I haven’t had a chance to really sit down and write code in ages. What I came up with is pretty different than the template I used to base it on, but very similar to how the blog looked before. I hope everyone likes it. And remember: in a few days now I’ll be switching commenting systems entirely, so don’t worry about any issues there.
