Endeavour Arrives Safely at the ISS

NASA’s space shuttle Endeavour docked with the International Space Station after ending a high-paced race, late Wednesday. The seven astronauts aboard the shuttle were warmly greeted by the three residents of ISS.

The crew will soon kick off the construction, which will include the unloading and fitting of the first section of a Japanese space laboratory. Also, they will put up a pair of Canadian robotic arms.

Five spacewalks are planned in the fortnight long mission. The first will take place on Friday, when the astronauts are scheduled to install the robotic arms on the station. The arms are extremely lengthy, each measuring 3.35m (11ft) long and are designed to fit and service components as small as a phone book or as large as a telephone booth.

They are attached to the shoulder of the robot, Dextre, which would work like a mechanic in space.

Mission specialists Rick Linnehan and Garrett Reisman will perform the 6.5-hour expedition outside of the space station.

"The spacewalk is going to be, I think, the highlight for my entire time up there," Reisman said in a preflight NASA interview. "I don't think anything that I'll do will be able to compare to going outside in a spacesuit and floating free of the station."

Also on agenda is the examination of the shuttle’s heat-shield, which has become mandatory after the Columbia disaster in 2003.

LeRoy Cain, chair of NASA's mission management team, said engineers will pore over the images to look for any signs of damage to Endeavour's heat shield.

According to Mike Moses, lead shuttle flight director a preliminary look at data from a scan of Endeavour's heat shield did not reveal anything of major concern so far.

"Everything looked really good," Moses said, noting that Endeavour's crew can perform a second and more detailed inspection if needed. "They don't suspect that we're going to have any focused inspection requirements."

Endeavour was launched from Kennedy Space Center at 2:28:14 a.m. EDT (0648:14 GMT) on March 11, and is expected to return to Earth on the evening of March 26.