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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – Space shuttle Discovery arrived at the International Space Station on Saturday, making its test meet before existence parked at a museum. "What took you guys so long?" asked the expanse station's commander, Scott Kelly.

Discovery should hit come and absent terminal November, but was grounded by render cell cracks. It blamed soured weekday with just digit seconds to spare after existence held up by a balky connector computer.

"Yeah, I don't know, we kind of waited until same the terminal digit seconds," said shuttle man Steven Lindsey.

The linkup occurred 220 miles above Australia. Discovery — air on its test travel — module spend at small a hebdomad at the orbiting outpost. It's carrying a closet-style room full of supplies as well as the prototypal mechanism robot to control in space.

The compartment module be attached permanently to the expanse send early incoming week.

Altogether, there are 12 people aboard the connected spacecraft, representing the United States, country and Italy. And in a historic first, four of the fivesome major partners hit vessels docked there right now, including load ships from Nihon and Europe. The entire combine has a mass of 1.2 meg pounds, including the shuttle.

It took individual than customary for the hatches to open because of a slight misalignment between the shuttle and send that necessary to be corrected. The digit skippers shook safekeeping when the doors finally swung open, and there were hugs every around.

It was a quick reunion. The astronauts hurried soured to see how farther they could get Sat daytime with the artefact of a papers retentive a spare radiator for the station. The colossus ridge was carried up aboard the shuttle.

Just before actuation in, Discovery performed a andante 360-degree backflip so expanse send cameras could getting some signs of start damage. At small four pieces of debris poor soured the render cell during liftoff, and digit of the strips of insulating sparkle struck Discovery's belly.

NASA managers do not conceive the shuttle was damaged. That's because the sparkle loss occurred so late in the launch, preventing a hard impact. The hundreds of digital pictures snapped by digit expanse send residents should confirm that; experts on the connector module spend the incoming period or digit poring over every the images.

As a precaution, every shuttle gathering since the 2003 river hardship has had to good analyse for possible alteration to the energy shielding, which staleness be burly for re-entering Earth's atmosphere.

Discovery — the prototypal to perform the tumble maneuver, backwards in 2005 — is the prototypal in the fast to be retired this year. Endeavour and then Atlantis module near discover the 30-year shuttle information by midsummer.

Discovery is the oldest of the three and the most traveled, with 143 meg miles logged over 39 flights and 26 years.

The mechanism launched aboard Discovery — Robonaut 2 or R2 for short — module rest at the expanse station, every boxed up for at small another few months. It's an experimental machine from the region up that module be proven before attempting ultimate jobs inside the orbiting complex. The idea is for R2 to yet help as an astronaut assistant.

"We're here!" Robonaut said in a Twitter update mass Saturday's docking. It actually was posted by a manlike associate on the ground. "Home sweet home!"

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Online:

NASA: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/main/index.html

Robonaut: http://robonaut.jsc.nasa.gov

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