Shuttle Touches Down After Extra Loop : Space: Endeavour lands with jackpot of ‘overwhelmingly successful’ scientific data for U.S. and Japan.

After making an extra orbit to allow the weather to clear, the space shuttle Endeavour landed back at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center on Sunday, concluding an eight-day mission devoted to more than 40 scientific experiments and already hailed as “overwhelmingly successful.”

Minutes after the orbiter’s seven-member crew stepped down to a red-carpet welcome, technicians climbed aboard the spacecraft to collect a host of test subjects and materials for American and Japanese scientists.

The shuttle, carrying a 23-foot-long laboratory called Spacelab-J in its cargo bay, initially was scheduled to land Saturday. But the flight was extended by one day when astronauts found themselves with plenty of fuel and supplies remaining.

With clouds lingering in the landing area at dawn, flight controllers opted for an additional trip around the Earth.

An hour and a half later, at 5:53 a.m. PDT, the aerospace plane knifed across a sky of clear blue, circled over the Atlantic Ocean and made a perfect touchdown. With Endeavour’s nose wheel still high off the concrete runway, a red and white drag chute trailed out from the tail to help bring it to a stop.

Kennedy Space Center Director Robert Crippen called the mission, the first manned space flight collaboration with Japan, a preview of cooperative research to be conducted aboard the planned space station Freedom.

In Huntsville, Ala., where scientists had monitored the round-the-clock activities aboard Endeavor, mission manager Aubrey King said that “all predetermined mission objectives have been met. The success of Spacelab-J is evident when you consider that we had over 40 experiments scheduled and we’ve received data on each one.”

In the course of the flight, scientist-astronauts spent much of their days working with a variety of alloys formed in high-temperature furnaces and observing biological test subjects ranging from frogs, fruit flies and Japanese carp to tadpoles and chicken eggs and hornets. Two-thirds of the hornets died because of high humidity in their containers.

As the shuttle circled the Earth, frog eggs fertilized in orbit produced tadpoles, which proved to swim in patterns wholly unlike those of siblings hatched on Earth and transported into space.

Besides the first Japanese astronaut, Endeavour’s crew included the first married couple is space and the first black woman in space, physician-astronaut Mae Jemison.