Home Again From 16-Day Space Endeavour

Returning from its 16-day STS-123 mission to the International Space Station (ISS), NASA’s Shuttle Endeavour safely returned to earth, with a crew of seven onboard. They included ESA astronaut Leopold Eyharts of France, who spent nearly 49 days in space on a mission to dock and commission Europe’s Columbus laboratory. The landing took place at 01:39 CET on March 27th at the Kennedy Space Center shuttle landing strip at Cape Canaveral, Florida. Leopold Eyharts (50) had been dispatched to the ISS on the previous shuttle flight on Atlantis on February 7th. That STS-122 mission included another ESA astronaut, Hans Schlegel of Germany. On February 10th, shortly after Atlantis had docked with the ISS, Eyharts was inducted in the resident ISS crew, trading places with NASA astronaut Dan Tani as a member of the Expedition 16 increment alongside NASA’s Peggy Whitson and Russian astronaut
One of Eyharts’ early tasks on board was to support the docking of the Columbus laboratory, firstly at the commands of the Station’s robotic arm to extract the European module from the shuttle cargo bay and later by activating the motorised bolts from inside the Harmony node module to secure the junction. “The European Columbus module is now part of the ISS,” he announced to mission control in Houston, Moscow and Munich at 21:44 UT (22:44 CET) on February 11th once the docking was complete. On the following day, Eyharts became the first astronaut to ingress the Columbus module in orbit. When Endeavour docked with the ISS on March 13th, Eyharts swapped crew assignments again, this time with NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman, and joined the crew of the STS-123 mission. As a qualified mission specialist in robotics, Eyharts contributed to the STS-123 assembly mission as operator of the Station’s robotic arm alongside Reisman and Bob Behnken, another NASA mission specialist. Eyharts is the second ESA astronaut to have become part of the resident ISS crew, Thomas Reiter having spent six months onboard in 2006. This was Eyharts’ second mission to a space station, having already flown to the Russian Mir station back in 1998. With Columbus now attached, such flights will be carried out more often. The next ESA astronaut to go—in 2009—will be Frank de Winne of Belgium, with Andre Kuipers of the Netherlands acting as backup. Meanwhile, ESA will keep up the momentum of its contributions to the ISS with the upcoming docking of the Jules Verne ATV, ESA’s first Automated Transfer Vehicle, scheduled for 3 April, and the launching of more science experiments to be conducted inside Columbus on future shuttle missions. Columbus is designed to support some 100 experiments per year over ten years. These experiments address all the major research areas: biology, exobiology, human physiology, fluid physics, fundamental physics, technology, solar physics. More European-built elements are also under preparation to be launched to the ISS over the coming years, notably the European Robotic Arm, the Node 3 module and the Cupola observation post.