STS 117 Home

After a mission of accomplishments and jitters, Atlantis landed safely in California this afternoon, successfully ending the STS 117 flight. The shuttle landed at Edwards Air Force Base because of iffy weather at Cape Canaveral in Florida.

The mission dealt with a possibly dangerous torn heat tile on Atlantis that astronauts repaired in a spacewalk. It also dealt with a shutdown of the Russian-built computers on ISS that keep the station properly oriented in space. The Russians were able to get the computers back online, but the software glitch could potentially have rendered the station useless, With that uncertainty surrounding them, however, the astronauts were still able to complete all the major tasks of the mission.

The biggest of those tasks was the installation and activation of another set of solar arrays. That will give ISS more power, and brings the completion of the station-- and the end of the shuttle era-- one step closer.