Space Shuttle

Columbia is set to make a pre-dawn landing at Florida's Kennedy Space Flight Center at 0932 universal time. 

Mission commander Scott Altman says he and his six fellow astronauts are exhausted but exhilarated. 

During their mission, Colombia astronauts went on five spacewalks to install hardware on the Hubble Space Telescope that makes it 10 times more powerful. 

Hubble was put in orbit in 1990, and has sent back priceless pictures and information about the solar system and distant galaxies. 

The astronauts installed new electricity-generating solar panels on Hubble along with a new stronger camera that will allow the telescope to peer even deeper into space.

 During one spacewalk, the astronauts had to completely power-down Hubble for the first time in orbit, with no guarantee they could completely restore electricity to the telescope.

 This would have brought a premature end to the Hubble project. But power was restored and the space agency says telescope is working perfectly.
 
 

Some information for this article provided by Reuters

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