Space shuttle Endeavour and its crew are home after carrying Japan’s maiden space laboratory and a Canadian repair robot to the International Space Station (ISS) on a record-setting mission. Endeavour landed at the Kennedy Space Centre after a 16-day mission that included a record 12-day docking at the ISS and five spacewalks.
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.