November 5, 1995
Web posted at: 10:40 a.m. EST
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Florida (CNN) -- The space shuttle Columbia ended NASA's second longest shuttle mission with a smooth landing Sunday morning at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. (1.5M QuickTime movie) NASA mission control said Columbia's mission from launch to landing lasted 15 days, 21 hours, 53 minutes and 16 seconds. That is 17 hours short of Endeavour's operation last March.
Columbia touched down in clear weather after gliding toward
earth at an angle seven times steeper than a commercial
airliner would take upon landing. An hour before touchdown,
commander Kenneth Bowersox fired the braking rockets for the
orbiter's freefall out of space.
The shuttle's crew of seven astronauts worked in split shifts to conduct scientific experiments around the clock. They are bringing back about 1,500 protein and semiconductor crystals and five marble-sized potatoes, all grown in weightlessness. The work mimicked that which could be conducted on a future space station. (113K AIFF sound or 113K WAV sound)
With Columbia's landing, NASA prepares to start the countdown on Wednesday for the next mission of Atlantis, which is to take off next Saturday. The schedule for Atlantis calls for it to rendezvous and dock on November 14 with the Russian space station Mir for a second time. The six-day turnaround between the missions of Columbia and Atlantis would be the shortest in NASA's shuttle history.
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