Andrew Careaga: March 2009 Archives

Welcome home, Sandy!

After 4 1/2 months in space, Sandra Magnus arrived back on earth at 2:15 p.m. Rolla time today (Saturday, March 28, 2009), when she and the rest of the crew of the Space Shuttle Discovery touched down at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. So ends a long adventure for Sandy. Congratulations!

Editors' note: Sandra Magnus' return to earth after a 4 1/2-month stay aboard the International Space Station has been delayed a few hours due to weather conditions. NASA will post the latest information about the Space Shuttle Discovery's landing on the STS-119 Landing Blog. As soon as we know anything, we'll post it here, too.

On behalf of the entire Missouri S&T community -- the students, faculty, staff and some 50,000 alumni worldwide -- we thank Sandy for dedicating so much time to providing updates to this blog during her journey aboard the International Space Station. And we thank all of your readers for visiting, reading, and submitting so many thoughtful questions and comments.

Editor's note: We just received word that this blog has won a major award from the Missouri Association of Publications. Spacebook received the "best overall website presentation" award during MAP's Annual Publishing Summit, held March 5-6 in Columbia, Missouri. Missouri S&T also won a couple other awards for our excellent alumni magazine.

We're proud to have great alumni like Sandra Magnus to help tell the story of this great university in so many different creative ways -- such as with this blog -- and we're equally proud of our great, hard-working staff. Congratulations, Sandy! Congratulations, Spacebook! And thank you, readers, for dropping by to visit, read, and comment.

Well, I know I am behind on these entries and I am sorry... We got busy, I got distracted, I had writer's block--all of the above are in part the reason why. But after thinking about it I decided to return to the subject of our planet mainly because I am spending a lot of time taking photos of it (and I have never been that much interested in photography!).

(Sandra took the desert photo below from the International Space Station. More photos and Sandra's NASA journal post can be found here.)

Editor's note: While a couple of her fellow space station inhabitants are preparing for a space walk, Sandra Magnus continues to lead experiments with fire in space. She has been focused on the Smoke Point in Co-flow Experiment, or SPICE, which determines the point at which gas-jet flames begin to emit soot in microgravity. Studying a soot-emitting flame will help scientists understand how fires spread in space and aid in the control of soot for future combustion systems. Read the full story here.

Pictured above is Sandy (center) with Expedition 18 Commander Michael Fincke (right) and cosmonaut Yury Lonchakov posing for a crew photo between a Russian Orlan spacesuit and an Extravehicular Mobility Unit spacesuit in the Harmony node of the International Space Station. Photo credit: NASA