A weightless Thanksgiving dinner for 10

With hugs and handshakes, shuttle Endeavour’s seven astronauts bid farewell to the International Space Station crew after a Thanksgiving meal together of turkey, cornbread dressing and candied yams.

“You’ve totally fixed us up on the inside and on the outside,” station commander Mike Fincke told Endeavour’s crew before the hatches between the station and shuttle were shut. “You guys were such perfect guests. You left the place cleaner than you found it.”

The shuttle was to undock early today and return to Florida on Sunday, completing a 16-day mission for Endeavour’s crew.

It delivered a new bathroom, kitchenette, two bedrooms, exercise equipment and a system that purifies urine, sweat and condensation into drinking water. All are needed to double the space station’s population to six next year.

Endeavour’s astronauts also performed four spacewalks to clean and lubricate a jammed joint that rotates solar wings in the direction of the sun to generate power.

The shuttle will bring back Gregory Chamitoff, who lived for six months at the space station. Astronaut Sandra Magnus, who arrived with Endeavour on Nov. 16, will take his place among the three-person crew.

Before the astronauts retired to the shuttle for the night, they ate and toasted the holiday, 220 miles above Earth.

“To Thanksgiving. Wishing everyone on Earth, and off Earth, a good Thanksgiving,” said Endeavour astronaut Donald Pettit, holding iced tea in a makeshift cup he had made from plastic covers of shuttle reference books.

Astronauts normally drink from pouches using straws to prevent liquids from spilling out in weightlessness, but Pettit wanted to show that they could sip from cups. Pettit also made an iced-tea toast to future space explorers and “just because we’re in space and we can.”

The astronauts spent an off-duty morning talking to friends and relatives on Earth or just enjoying a view not too many will ever see.

“Just that ability to look out the window and look down on this beautiful planet that we live on is a source of thanks that we all have,” Endeavour commander Christopher Ferguson said.

Flight controllers in Mission Control also got into the Thanksgiving spirit.

They ate Thanksgiving dinners at their consoles and placed an animated turkey on the center’s gigantic electronic map, which tracks the orbiting space station.

In the afternoon, flight controllers lined up in Mission Control, each holding a sign with a letter spelling out “Happy Thanksgiving” for the space shuttle crew as the song “Grease” played over loudspeakers in a tribute to the grease-gun-carrying spacewalkers.

Food taken to space has to be bacteria-free, and that is done by either treating meats with radiation, dehydrating vegetables or heating other foods up to 250 degrees for a half-hour.

For the Thanksgiving dinner, the smoked turkey was irradiated and the green beans and dressing were freeze-dried. The candied yams and dessert were heated.