BOOM-BOOM: Hubble Shuttle's supersonic return

It's IT Blogwatch, and Space Shuttle Atlantis is back from its extended NASA mission to fix the Hubble Space Telescope. Richi Jennings takes a break from pure IT topics to watch what bloggers are saying. Not to mention defying death at the gym...

In case you've been living in a cave, here's Lester Haines:

Space shuttle Atlantis today landed at Edwards Air Force Base at the end of its successful final servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope ... at 15:39 GMT. It was due to return Friday, but inclement weather forced NASA to twice postpone the homecoming. The first possible landing at Kennedy was also "waved off" earlier today ... and NASA elected to put Atlantis down at Edwards.

During five space walks, the shuittle's crew installed the new Wide Field Camera 3 and Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, replaced the troublesome Science Instrument Command and Data Handling Unit, gyros and nickel-hydrogen battery units, and repaired the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph and the Advanced Camera for Surveys. All being well, the venerable eye in the sky is now in good shape to continue working until at least 2014.

Sharon Gaudin adds:

The crew had been aloft on what was expected to be an 11-day mission to repair and upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope. After 19 years in space, the orbiter received all new batteries, new gyroscopes and a new computer unit, along with a new wide-field camera and spectrograph, which acts as a sort of outer space prism, separating light from the universe into its component colors, giving scientists a "wavelength fingerprint" of any object.
...
The astronauts released Hubble from the shuttle's payload bay on Tuesday. Scientists now will spend the next four months or so testing and calibrating the new instruments before Hubble begins its scientific observations.

Robert "wasguru" Bell heard it arrive, with a double-sonic-boom:

nothing like waking up to the sound of the Space Shuttle landing to remind you that you live in SoCal.

Reuters' Robert Basler brings a mea culpa:

Space shuttle Atlantis lands safely in Florida ... I think this was a good lesson in not writing headlines in advance for instant use when an event occurs. The shuttle was diverted, the headline wasn’t ... Lots and lots of readers noticed and commented.
...
Do you ever look at your web page headlines? Are you kidding? Asleep? The Shuttle landed in California at Edwards Air Force Base. ON LIVE TV!!! Wake up Reuters! ... Duh- did anyone proofread this- article headline says shuttle lands in FLORIDA, but article says it landed in California.

What's next? Michael Horton knows:

Now that Space Shuttle Atlantis has landed at Edwards Air Force Base in California, the NASA team is working hard on preparing the shuttle for transport back to Kennedy Space Center in Florida, a transportation that will cost nearly $2 million ...NASA will use the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft or SCA, which are essentially two heavily modified Boeing 747 airliners.
...
In about a week the Shuttle will have returned to Florida where it will be prepared for ... STS-129 ... scheduled for November ... will be used to deliver components ... to the International Space Station. The next ... flight, mission STS-127 ... will deliver Timothy L. Kopra to the station as a flight engineer and science officer and return Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata to Earth ... The Endeavor Shuttle will also deliver the Kibo Japanese Experiment Module Exposed Facility and Experiment Logistics Module Exposed Section.

Meanwhile, The Living Fractal is simultaneously proud and sad:

I've had the distinct pleasure of working with Jim Wetherbee, the man who has commanded more NASA shuttle flights than any other ... I asked him why he left NASA ... I think he felt like the country's support of NASA is terrible and he decided he wanted to go somewhere that he could make a difference.
...
It's sad really. The space program, while expensive, has resulted in many great technological discoveries and inventions. And yet do you even know how small of a percent of our GDP goes towards it? It's pathetic.

So what's your take? Get involved and leave a comment.

And finally...

• The Breakdown: Defying Death at the Gym
  [Science is fun!]

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Richi Jennings is an independent analyst/consultant, specializing in blogging, email, and spam. A 24 year, cross-functional IT veteran, he is also an analyst at Ferris Research. You can follow him on Twitter or FriendFeed, pretend to be Richi's friend on Facebook, or just use boring old email: contact Richi.