Space shuttle Discovery separated on Saturday from the International Space Station (ISS) in a first step towards its journey back to Earth.
Discovery is set to orbit Earth until early Monday, when it is scheduled to touch down at Kennedy Space Centre at Cape Canaveral in Florida.
The crew spent their last day aboard the International Space Station readying for the trip home. The astronauts gathered for a farewell dinner with the ISS’ two crew members.
‘‘It’s been a wild ride,’’ shuttle commander Eileen Collins said. ‘‘We’ve been happy to finally put the icing on the cake through this mission, we are so happy things have worked out so well. See you next week, see you on the ground,’’ she said.
Collins, the only mother on board, has been sending messages everyday from space to her young son, Luke, age 4, and daughter, nine-year-old Bridget.
The e-mails are calm and reassuring, ‘‘telling them what I’m doing and telling them that I love them and that I miss them and not to worry about us’’, she said.
Her husband, Pat Youngs, has shielded the children as much as possible from some of the periodically unsettling news from has come Discovery’s mission.
It’s been an emotional and bumpy ride for the astronauts’ families, ‘‘almost like a soap opera’’, Youngs said.
Unlike past missions where there were no cameras showing every little ding and chip in orbit, Discovery has been under magnified scrutiny as the first shuttle to fly after the loss of Columbia in 2003. Slashing speed from nearly 29,000 kph at upto 1,650 degrees Celsius, landing the US space shuttle permits little error in the best case, NASA officials say.
‘‘Flying a re-entry is not what normal sane people would normally call safe,’’ said Wayne Hale, shuttle deputy programme manager.