Intro Music
Discovery lit up the night as the space shuttle raced into the evening sky on Dec. 9 to begin the STS-116 mission.
The spacecraft left on a flight to swap space station crew members and update the lab's electrical system to generate maximum power.
Commanded by Mark Polansky, the mission was highlighted by the success of three planned spacewalks and an unplanned foray to
fix a sticky solar array.
The first spacewalk was performed by Bob Curbeam and Christer Fuglesang to attach the P5 truss to the station.
A day later, Discovery's crew tried to retract the P6 array already attached to the station.
But the effort was stymied by binding grommets and guide wires, keeping the panel from being completely folded up.
During the next spacewalk, Curbeam and Fuglesang set out to connect half of the cables needed to funnel electricity from the new P4 solar array.
The wiring job went off without a hitch and far quicker than engineers had anticipated.
The story was much the same when Sunita Williams joined Curbeam for the third spacewalk.
The pair again made quick work of the rewiring, completing that task and installing a space station debris shield with plenty of time to spare.
Before heading back to Discovery's airlock, mission controllers dispatched Curbeam and Williams to take a closer look at
the jammed P6 solar array.
There, they wiggled and jiggled the lanky array, hoping to coax more of its panels into a storage box.
In the end, the crew managed to stow only a few more sections of the solar array, setting up Monday's last-ditch spacewalk to complete the job.
Curbeam and Fuglesang proved triumphant in their bid when they used a robot arm and hand tools to free the sticky grommets and retract the P6 array.
Following a week of showing how good teamwork makes the best plans better, the STS-116 crew departed the International Space Station.
Discovery's roundtrip mission ended almost like it began: with a flaming burst of its engines in the orbital darkness, landing in its hometown
at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.