Discovery Is Home

Shuttle Discovery landed safely in Florida early this afternoon, bringing the STS-120 mission to a successful conclusion.

STS-120 was an ambitious mission that got even more so. The goal of the mission was to prepare ISS for the final phase of its construction. Part of that involved repositioning a solar power array. In the process of doing that, a solar panel was torn, and the array stuck short of full deployment. So, NASA improvised on the fly.

In an extremely challenging, potentially dangerous spacewalk (as if all spacewalks aren't potentially dangerous), astronaut Scott Parazynski repaired the tear and allowed the array to fully deploy, which means it will supply all the power it was designed to deliver.

This mission demonstrated once again the level of maturity of NASA's spaceflight capabilities.