Bad Astronomy

Shuttle lands Saturday

The Space Shuttle Discovery is due to touch down in Florida at 13:43 Eastern time Saturday! As usual, I’ll try to live Tweet it (on my new BA News account). The mission was pretty successful, with the installation of a new truss and solar panels that has given the Space Station full power capacity, as well as bringing up a new crew member and taking one away. The one big glitch was a pin installed upside-down in an equipment platform, which NASA hopes to get fixed soon.

Remember, you can watch the landing on NASA TV (and if you have it, the cable station HDNet commonly shows them live in HD too).

In other Shuttle news, Atlantis rolls out to the pad Tuesday! When it launches (scheduled for May 12) it’ll be heading to perform the last servicing mission on the Hubble Space Telescope.