CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- The space shuttle Atlantis glided to a flawless Florida touchdown Saturday to close out a 'wonderful adventure' marred somewhat by the partial failure of a daring $379 million experiment.
Dropping like a stone through a partly cloudy sky, Atlantis kicked up swirling clouds of blue smoke as its main landing gear tires smacked the surface of runway 33 at 9:12 a.m. EDT, just a few miles from launch pad 39-B where the 49th shuttle flight began July 31.
Speeding down the Kennedy Space Center's 300-foot-wide landing strip at more than 200 mph, commander Loren Shriver pumped the shuttle's brakes and carefully brought the 100-ton spaceplane to a stop as ground crews swarmed onto the runway to assist the crew and service the orbiter.
'Houston, Atlantis; wheels stopped,' Shriver radioed mission control as Atlantis coasted to a halt.
'Welcome to Florida and congratulations,' replied astronaut James Halsell from the Johnson Space Center in Houston. 'And Loren, to you and your entire crew, we just want to say job well done (for your) outstanding and hard work on this very challenging mission. You did great.'
'Thanks, Jim, and it's really nice to be back,' Shriver said. 'We'll talk to all you guys later. It was a great one, I'll tell you.'
Left behind in orbit was a $213 million European Space Agency science satellite launched by the crew last weekend. But repeated cable jams prevented the astronauts from completing a bold experiment to fling a half-ton Italian satellite 12 miles into space on the end of a slender tether.
'It was a wonderful adventure: eight days of very intense work to try to prove the tethered satellite technology,' astronaut Franklin Chang-Diaz said before flying back to Houston. 'I think the tethered satellite system...basically works. We did not get as far as we wanted to go, but in itself, the system is a very sound concept.'
Jeremiah Pearson, NASA's associate administrator for space flight, said the Italian Tethered Satellite System spacecraft may be flown again to complete research on tapping into the power of Earth's magnetic field.
'I'm sure there'll be some consideration on flying the tether again, ' Pearson said. 'Speaking to the Italians, they were very happy we brought it back. When we fly it again, I can't answer that now. I know out in the future, there's talk of manifesting it, but I can't give you a date.'
As for whether NASA 'owes' the Italians another flight, Pearson said, 'I wouldn't say we owe them anything. We did what we were supposed to do.'
Shriver, 47, Chang-Diaz, 42, co-pilot Andrew Allen, 37, Swiss astronaut Claude Nicollier, 47, Marsha Ivins, 41, Jeffrey Hoffman, 47, and Italian Franco Malerba, 45, began flying back to Houston in two groups later in the day.
Atlantis's landing, which came one 89-minute orbit late because of rainy weather, originally was scheduled for Friday. But the flight was extended one day because of technicial glitches with the European-built Eureca satellite that forced the crew to delay its launch last weekend by 24 hours.
Eureca is scheduled to be returned to Earth next April by the crew of another shuttle mission. The goal of the project is to expose a variety of materials and biological samples to the effects of weightlessness for some nine months.
But the primary goal of Atlantis's flight was the launch and retrieval of the tethered satellite on the end of its 12-mile-long cable.
Sweeping through Earth's magnetic field high in the planet's electrically charged ionosphere, the tethered satellite was expected to generate 5,000 volts of electricity for basic research that one day could lead to advanced power systems in orbit.
But repeated jams in the rod and reel-like mechanism used to play out the 0.1-inch-wide tether prevented the spherical probe from rising more than 843 feet above Atlantis -- far too low to conduct any useful science.
While the astronauts were able to demonstrate a surprising ability to control and operate the bobbing spacecraft, none of the experiment's primary objectives was met.
Next up for NASA: Launch of the shuttle Endeavour on a Japanese- chartered Spacelab science missionSept. 11. The seven-member crew includes the first Japanese citizen to fly on a shuttle and the first husband and wife in space history to be assigned to the same crew: NASA astronauts Mark Lee and Jan Davis.
