Space shuttle closes in on space station

Space shuttle closes in on space station

HOUSTON - Shuttle Discovery closed in on the international space station early Monday with a super-size delivery: a scientific lab that's as big as a school busDiscovery was also ferrying up the space station's newest resident: astronaut Gregory Chamitoff.

"We're having a great time up here. Today is going to be even more exciting as we get to see the space station as we approach and dock," Chamitoff said as the shuttle headed for its Monday afternoon rendezvous.

Chamitoff will call the space station home for the next six months. He'll replace Garrett Reisman, who will return to Earth aboard the shuttle.

The space shuttle and its seven astronauts are delivering the $1 billion lab on behalf of Japan. They'll install the lab, with help from the space station's three residents, on Tuesday.

It's named Kibo, Japanese for hope, and is 37 feet long and weighs more than 32,000 pounds.

Shuttle commander Mark Kelly and his crew also have a new pump for the space station's malfunctioning toilet. The Russian-built toilet broke 1 1/2 weeks ago, and space officials hope this pump — from a different manufacturing batch than the spares on board — will get it working normally.

Before parking at the space station, Kelly was going to guide Discovery through a slow back flip so the station residents could photograph the shuttle's underside.

It's one of the safety measures put in place by NASA after the 2003 Columbia accident to check for launch damage.

On Sunday, the astronauts performed a cursory wing inspection using their ship's 50-foot robot arm. They sent ground controllers images of the upper edges of the wings, but could not check the lower edges of the wings and the nose cap because they lacked the proper laser tools.

Their laser-equipped inspection boom is at the space station, left there by the previous shuttle crew in March. They'll retrieve it and, after they depart, perform a full survey.

Discovery did not have enough room for the 50-foot boom — standard equipment on all of the previous post-Columbia missions — because of the enormous lab filling its payload bay.

About five pieces of insulating foam broke off Discovery's external fuel tank during Saturday's liftoff, and one or two of them may have hit the shuttle. NASA officials said they were not too worried because the foam losses occurred after the crucial first two minutes of the flight and therefore lacked the acceleration to do much, if any, damage.

What's more, the foam fragments looked to be thin and flimsy.

Astronaut Karen Nyberg said neither she nor her crewmates saw anything wrong as they were surveying the wings.

"To me, it looked really good," flight director Matt Abbott said from Johnson Space Center. But he cautioned: "We've got a lot of work to do to go through the data."

Discovery's fuel tank was the first one built from scratch with all of the post-Columbia safety changes. The tank, at least from the early data, looks to have performed well, said LeRoy Cain, chairman of the mission management team.