Before docking with the International Space Station (ISS) on Friday, space shuttle Endeavour performed a backflip manoeuvre so that crew members on the station could check the shuttle's heat shield for damage. Earlier in the week, as the shuttle lifted off from Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, pieces of foam insulation fell off the orbiter's external fuel tank, striking the shuttle and carving small nicks into several of the tiles that make up the thermal shield.
The Space Shuttle Endeavour successfully docked at the International Space Station at 17:47 GMT (1:47 p.m. EDT) while it was orbiting 350 km over the Gulf of Carpentaria, northern Australia.
The crew of space shuttle Endeavour has begun preparing to dock with the International Space Station (ISS). Before docking, scheduled for 17:55 GMT, the shuttle will perform a backflip, allowing the ISS team to photograph and inspect Endeavour's heat shield. When the two crews join together, there will be a record 13 astronauts on the orbiting outpost.
The Endeavour space shuttle is scheduled to dock with the ISS at 17:55 GMT (13:53 EDT). Endeavour will dock to the PMA-2 (Pressurised Mating Adapter) on the Harmony module.
Space shuttle Endeavour rocketed toward the international space station Thursday as engineers on Earth pored over launch pictures that showed debris breaking off the fuel tank and striking the craft. Mission Control told the astronauts late Wednesday that the damage looked less extensive at first glance than what occurred on the last shuttle flight, but it will take days to sort through available data to reach a conclusion. The astronauts planned a Thursday afternoon inspection of their ship's thermal shielding, using a 100-foot laser-tipped boom. The procedure has been standard since shuttle flights resumed after the Columbia accident.
Debris Hits Endeavour On Liftoff When Endeavour lifted off today, onboard cameras captured pieces of debris falling off the exterior fuel tank and striking the shuttle, the Houston Chronicle reports. NASA officials say it's probably no big deal, and the crew will examine the orbiter with external cameras tomorrow.
Space shuttle Endeavour and its seven-member crew launched at 6:03 p.m. EDT Wednesday from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The mission will deliver the final segment to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Kibo laboratory and a new crew member to the International Space Station. Endeavour's 16-day mission includes five spacewalks and the installation of two platforms outside the Japanese module. One platform is permanent and will allow experiments to be directly exposed to space. The other is an experiment storage pallet that will be detached and returned with the shuttle. During the mission, Kibo's robotic arm will transfer three experiments from the pallet to the exposed platform. Future experiments also can be moved to the platform from the inside of the station using the laboratory's airlock.
The US space agency Nasa has successfully launched the space shuttle Endeavour - at the sixth attempt. Earlier launches at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida were called off because of bad weather and fuel leaks. The crew will spend 11 days on the International Space Station, finishing work on a Japanese research laboratory. If the shuttle had not taken off by Thursday, it would have had to have waited until the end of the month to make way for a Russian cargo ship.