Safe Landing Ends Successful Shuttle Mission

Space shuttle Discovery and its seven-member crew returned to Earth on Monday after fixing the Hubble Space Telescope during a Christmastime mission that gave NASA a badly needed success.

Air Force Col. Curtis Brown landed the shuttle at 7:01 p.m. EST at Kennedy Space Center.

“Welcome back to Earth after a fantastic flight,” said Mission Control’s Scott Altman.

NASA passed up the first opportunity for the shuttle to land--at 5:18 p.m. EST--because of concerns about crosswinds on the runway. Instead, Discovery made the 13th night landing in the history of the shuttle program.

The mission, originally scheduled to last 10 days, was cut to eight because of several launch delays and NASA’s desire to have the shuttle on the ground well before New Year’s Day to avoid any Y2K computer problems. It was the first shuttle flight during Christmas.

During spacewalks on three successive days, the astronauts repaired the Hubble and upgraded the $3-billion observatory.

The Hubble, in space for nearly 10 years, stopped working Nov. 13 after its gyroscopes broke.

The success of the Hubble repair mission was a boost for NASA, which in recent months has suffered a series of embarrassments.

The problems have included the loss of two missions to Mars: The Mars Climate Orbiter apparently burned up in the planet’s atmosphere in September because of a failure to convert measurements to metric units, and the Mars Polar Lander disappeared this month.