‘Marginal’ Weather Expected for Shuttle Landing

The secret military mission of the space shuttle Atlantis is set to end today, but NASA said a storm front moving into Southern California would affect conditions at the landing site.

And amateur observers said they had already spotted the shuttle’s secret cargo in orbit.

NASA broke a news blackout on the flight Saturday to announce that Atlantis would land at 10:08 a.m. at Edwards Air Force Base in California.

“The weather is close to marginal, but it looks acceptable,” said Nancy Lovato of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. She said the landing time forecast calls for winds gusting to 20 m.p.h. with scattered clouds and 7-mile visibility, “and it gets worse later in the day.”

Weather has affected Atlantis’ mission from the beginning. Four launch delays were caused by poor weather. A computer failure caused a fifth delay, one short of a record for shuttle missions.

Atlantis’ five-member, military crew spent most of Saturday preparing for the return to Earth, but because of the secret nature of their mission no details were released.

A two-sentence statement announcing the landing time said: “The crew is doing well and beginning landing preparations, and the orbiter continues to perform satisfactorily.”

Atlantis was launched early Wednesday. NASA sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the astronauts released a $500-million spy satellite into orbit Thursday. Sources said the satellite is capable of taking high resolution photos and listening in on electronic communications around the world.

While NASA and the Pentagon refused to give details of the mission, a network of amateur observers led by Ted Molczan of Toronto said they were able to see both the shuttle and the satellite in orbit.

Molczan said in a telephone interview that an observer in Scotland saw Atlantis, appearing as a bright, fast-moving point of light, pass overhead early Friday. The shuttle was followed about a minute later by a smaller object that Molczan said apparently was the satellite.

Later, around dawn over North America, Molczan said observers in Yellowknife, White Horse and Hay River, in Canada, and in Fairbanks, Alaska, reported sightings.

“For those sightings, the payload (satellite) came over at the time we predicted for the orbiter,” Molczan said. “The orbiter was seen earlier. This means that the orbiter had dropped into a lower orbit.”

Such a maneuver would put distance between the two craft since a lower object orbits faster. On a later pass over the observers, there was even more separation, he said.

Molczan calculated that the satellite was in an orbit of 161 miles and the shuttle was at about 152 miles.

“The shuttle and the satellite are extremely bright,” Molczan said. “Brighter than any star.”