Cape Canaveral (Florida): The US space shuttle Atlantis landed safely at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Thursday after the first construction mission to the International Space Station since the 2003 Columbia disaster.
Atlantis and its crew of six touched down before dawn following a 12-day mission that saw astronauts complete three spacewalks and install a new solar power module on the half-built, $100-billion orbiting outpost.
Astronauts fired the spaceship's braking rockets while the shuttle flew upside down and backward over the Indian Ocean and Atlantis made its fiery reentry into Earth's atmosphere as temperatures outside the shuttle reached nearly 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,650 C).
Its long glide took the shuttle over the south Pacific Ocean, Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula and Florida's southwest coast and ended with a smooth landing on the three-mile-(4.8-km-)long runway at the space center on the state's east coast.
The landing was delayed a day after some unidentified objects were spotted flying just outside the shuttle.
The crew performed hours of unscheduled inspections on Wednesday to make sure the spaceship had not been damaged.
NASA managers cleared the ship to return home after the inspections turned up no signs of damage to the orbiter's protective heat shield or other critical systems.
The US space agency implemented extensive in-space inspections after shuttle Columbia was destroyed in 2003 in an accident blamed on debris that hit the spaceship during launch.
The damage went undetected and the shuttle disintegrated over Texas as it reentered the atmosphere.
Atlantis' mission restarted construction on the space station that was suspended after the Columbia accident.
It was the first of at least 15 flights needed to complete the space station by 2010, when the shuttles will be retired.
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