Space shuttle Endeavour headed for home on Wednesday after delivering a Japanese module and a Canadian robot to the International Space Station. Its 16-day mission was scheduled to end with a landing at Kennedy Space Centre in Florida at 23.05pm GMT, 33 minutes before sundown.
A pair of astronauts ended a spacewalk late on Thursday in which they tested a repair procedure for the heat shields on the space-shuttle fleet — a technique Nasa hopes it never needs to use. During the over six-hour outing the pair also replaced a faulty circuit breaker and removed a thermal sock from the station’s new Canadian-built handyman robot.