The US shuttle Discovery touched down in Florida on Saturday, capping a successful 14-day mission to deliver and open Japan’s first space laboratory at the International Space Station (ISS). Under a sunny sky, the orbiter carrying seven astronauts landed right on time at 11:15am at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral after gliding over Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula as it plunged toward Earth. “Beautiful landing, Mark, and congratulations on a great mission,” a mission control official told Discovery commander Mark Kelly. “It’s great to be back, and it’s great for all of us to be part of a big team that made the station a little bit bigger, a little bit more capable,” Kelly replied. After traveling 217 orbits and 9.2 million kilometers around Earth, Discovery plunged toward the planet at more than 20 times the speed of sound before slowing down for its landing. A double sonic boom signaled the shuttle’s imminent arrival. Three minutes before landing, Kelly took the shuttle off auto-pilot and steered it toward Kennedy’s landing strip number 15. NASA had given the shuttle the green light to wrap up its two-week journey and return to Earth after it determined that the loss of a small clip from its rudder posed no risk during landing. The agency has kept a close eye on the shuttle’s protective thermal layer since a crack in Columbia’s heat shield caused the orbiter to explode as it re-entered Earth’s atmosphere in February 2003, killing its seven astronauts. Discovery undocked from the ISS on Wednesday about 344km above the South Pacific east of Australia. The shuttle’s main task was to deliver, open and outfit the 11.2m long, 4.4m wide main module of the Japanese Kibo laboratory, which became the station’s biggest facility. At a press briefing after the landing, Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide described his feelings when Discovery left the ISS and the Kibo lab he had known and monitored back at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. “When we went to close the hatch, that was a tender moment, it was kind of sad,” he said. Kibo — which means “Hope” in Japanese — represents Japan’s and Asia’s first major contribution to the orbiting international station, which already has modules from the US, Russia and the European Space Agency. Shuttle Endeavour had already brought the bus-sized lab’s storage room in March. The third and final part of the lab — an outdoor facility that will allow experiments to be exposed to the effects of space — will be delivered next year. When completed, Kibo will allow astronauts to carry out experiments in medicine, biology and biotechnology, material production and communications, both in a pressurized environment and completely exposed to space.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
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