CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida, March 18 -- The space shuttle Columbia and five astronauts capped a successful two-week research flight with a landing in Florida Friday morning, to complete NASA's second-longest shuttle mission.
Gliding through clear and crisp skies, commander John Casper gently steered NASA's oldest spaceship through a series of turns to burn off speed, then landed Columbia at 8:10 a.m. EST/1310 GMT on a narrow, canal-lined runway at the Kennedy Space Center.
'Welcome home. Thanks for a great job and a fantastic two weeks of microgravity research,' astronaut Ken Cockrell radioed to the crew from Mission Control in Houston.
The touchdown marked an end to a 5.8-million mile journey, which took the crew around the world 223 times. Casper, co-pilot Andrew Allen, flight engineer Charles 'Sam' Gemar, Marsha Ivins and Pierre Thuot had hoped to stay in space for one more orbit to break the record for the longest shuttle mission.
Flight directors, concerned about strengthening winds, opted for the earlier landing opportunity, leaving the veteran crew just under an hour short of the record.
Columbia's mission was dedicated to a variety of microgravity experiments and demonstrations of prototype space technology projects, including a model space station truss, a new magnetic grapple for the shuttle's robot arm and an advanced modem for the astronauts' laptop computer.
The astronauts also participated in 13 medical experiments designed to examine the effects of long-duration spaceflight on the human body.
Most of the primary experiments required little attention by the crew. Ground control teams remotely operated the United States Microgravity Payload -- a collection of four physics and materials sciences experiments and an acceleration monitoring device -- and another half-dozen experiments sponsored by NASA's Aeronautics and Space Technology office.
'This mission of scientific discovery has been a substantial success,' said mission scientist Peter Curreri, with the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
Inaddition to learning more about how materials form and behave in weightlessness, scientists gained valuable experience operating their experiments via remote control -- a procedure, called telescience, that will be crucial for the planned international space station later this decade.
Columbia's flight was the 61st for the shuttle program and second of eight scheduled for this year.
Less than three weeks after Columbia's landing, NASA managers plan to launch shuttle Endeavour with the first Space Radar Laboratory on an environmental science mission lasting up to 10 days. Blastoff is targeted for April 7.
