Shuttle is home safe

The mission was considered one of the more complex.
WASHINGTON POST
The space shuttle Discovery landed at the Kennedy Space Center at sunset Friday, ending a 13-day mission to further assembly of the international space station.
The late-afternoon landing on a floodlit runway came after a two-hour, one-orbit delay, caused by cloudy conditions in Florida. The landing was smooth and the crew appeared to be in good health.
Discovery's return completed NASA's third successful shuttle flight of 2006, the most since 2002. After the Columbia disaster that killed seven astronauts in 2003, the space agency redesigned the shuttle's fuel tank and changed safety procedures in space.
"Congratulations on what was probably the most complex [station] assembly mission to date," astronaut Ken Ham, at Mission Control in Houston, radioed to the crew as the shuttle came to a stop.
"You've got seven thrilled people right here," replied commander Mark Polansky.
Weather concerns
The Florida landing was a pleasant surprise to NASA managers, who feared that bad weather would require a landing at either Edwards Air Force Base in California -- where strong crosswinds posed problems -- or at the White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico, where a shuttle had not landed since 1982. It can take weeks or months to transport the shuttle back to Florida, and that delay could have caused trouble for NASA's plan to send 13 more missions to the space station by 2010.
The Discovery crew continued assembly of the facility, adding an additional truss segment, rewiring the station's power system, and working to refold a solar panel that had folded up improperly.