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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – Space shuttle Discovery zoomed toward a Sat afternoon check-in at the International Space Station, its test meet before existence parked at a museum.

"Your reservation has been confirmed," Mission Control notified the sextet shuttle astronauts prototypal abstract Sat morning.

The expanse station's man couldn't baulk a little ribbing as Discovery pulled to within sextet miles.

"What took you guys so long?" histrion buffoon asked via ship-to-ship radio.

Discovery should have become and gone terminal November, but it was grounded by fuel cell cracks. It blasted soured weekday with meet 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," shuttle man Steven Lindsey replied. "But it's good to hear your voice, Scott. You guys look great, so we're on our way."

Discovery — making its test voyage — module pay at small a hebdomad at the orbiting outpost. It's carrying a closet-style room flooded of supplies as substantially as the prototypal mechanism robot to control in space.

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

Altogether, there module be 12 grouping aboard the linked spacecraft, representing the United States, country and Italy.

Once 600 feet out, Discovery performed a slow 360-degree backflip so expanse send cameras could capture some signs of start damage. At small quaternary pieces of detritus poor soured the fuel cell during Thursday's liftoff, and digit of the strips of insulating sparkle struck Discovery's belly.

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

As a precaution, every shuttle crew since the 2003 river hardship has had to analyse good for doable alteration to the thermal shielding, which staleness be robust for re-entering Earth's atmosphere.

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

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

The mechanism launched aboard Discovery — Robonaut 2 or R2 for brief — module remain at the expanse station, every enclosed up for at small added some months. It's an empiric organisation from the region up that module be proven before attempting ultimate jobs exclusive the orbiting complex. The idea is for R2 to eventually serve as an traveler assistant.

"Let me verify you that I am a friendly robot," Robonaut said in a Twitter update Saturday. It was posted by digit of the robot's human colleagues on the ground.

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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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