Astronauts Conduct a Pre-Return Trash Pickup

Space shuttle Discovery’s astronauts shoved the international space station into a higher orbit Saturday and finished stuffing trash, dirty laundry and old equipment into a cargo carrier for return to Earth.

“As you can imagine, the space station is a closed volume and we’ve had a crew of three living up here for some 20 weeks,” said Andrew Thomas, the astronaut in charge of packing. “And, as is inevitable, a lot of trash and waste is generated.”

Mission managers, meanwhile, ordered a test of Discovery’s main computers late Saturday night.

The officials huddled for more than an hour, debating whether the software for all four computers should be reloaded, a lengthy process never attempted in flight. In the end, they decided that the computers were probably fine and that a so-called confidence test would prove it.

Computer experts at Mission Control had feared the software might have been corrupted by the astronauts’ hasty reactivation of two of the computers earlier in the day.

The Italian-made cargo carrier, Leonardo, doubled as a garbage can during Discovery’s delivery mission. It was launched aboard Discovery on March 8, attached to space station Alpha on March 12 and then emptied of 5 tons of gear. Astronauts and cosmonauts spent the last few days filling it with more than 1 ton of stuff for return to Earth.

Leonardo was to be detached from the space station early today and mounted back in Discovery’s payload bay in preparation for tonight’s departure of the shuttle.

The 13-day mission is due to end Wednesday with a landing at the Kennedy Space Center.