Live In Orbit: Winds Shift For 3:14 PM Landing

Discovery's astronauts are prepping their spaceship for a mid-afternoon landing at Kennedy Space Center and a new resident crew boarded the International Space Station along with a visiting space tourist.

The shuttle crew aims to bring Discovery home to a 3:14 p.m. touchdown on Runway 15, which is the north end of the three-mile strip at KSC.

Should cloud cover clear and brisk winds dissipate, the astronauts will be instructed to perform a deorbit burn around 2:11 p.m. NASA's Mission Control Center told the astronauts that a sea breeze is causing a shift in wind direction and clearing out some cloud cover.

"Things are looking good," NASA astronaut George Zamka told the crew from Mission Control, where he is serving as the CAPCOM, or capsule communicator.

"That sounds like great news," Discovery mission commander Lee Archambault replied.

Flying the shuttle upside down and backwards over the Pacifio Ocean, Archambault would fire Discovery's twin maneuvering engines for about three minutes -- a retrograde burn that would slow the shuttle by about 231 mph, just enough to drop the spaceship out of orbit and onto an hour long freefall toward KSC.

Discovery would zoom over the Pacific Ocean and the Yucatan Peninsula before crossing the Gulf of Mexico of Mexico and making landfall around Tampa Bay.

The orbiter then would cross over Orlando and east central Florida before making a sweeping, 260-degree left turn over the Atlantic Ocean before flying a final approach to the runway over the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge.

NASA astronaut Brent Jett, director of the Flight Crew Operations Direactorate at Johnson Space Center in Houston, is back in a Shuttle Training Aircraft, flying weather reconnaissance around the central Florida region.

The Gulfstream II aircraft is modified to mimic the shuttle's brick-like dive to the runway, which is seven times steeper than that of a commercial airliner.

Jett will be doing touch-and-gos at the landing strip to help determine whether it will be safe to give Discovery and its crew a go-ahead for the deorbit burn. A go/no-go decision is expected around 1:45 p.m. or 2 p.m.

ABOUT THE IMAGES: Click to enlarge the long-range, mid-range and short-range ground tracks. The NASA images show the flight path Discovery will follow if the astronauts are given a go to land at 3:14 p.m. You can also click to enlarge the Florida Today photo of the Shuttle Training Aircraft flying over the Kennedy Space Center just behind our blockhouse. Photo credit: Florida Today/Craig Bailey