CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - Space shuttle Endeavour closed in on the international space station on Wednesday for a late-night linkup that will kick off almost two weeks of demanding construction work.
Before the docking, though, Endeavour's commander, Dominic Gorie, was set to guide the shuttle through a 360-degree backflip to allow for full photographic surveillance.
It's one of the many safety-related procedures put in place following the Columbia tragedy in 2003.
The space station crew got out cameras with high-powered zoom lenses to photograph every square foot of Endeavour from nose to tail, especially all the thermal tiles on its belly. The pictures will be scrutinized to see if the shuttle suffered any damage during Tuesday's launch.
Something, maybe a bird, may have struck Endeavour's nose nine or 10 seconds after liftoff. The launch images are inconclusive so far. NASA expects that images collected during the astronauts' laser inspection of the nose and wings will reveal any damage, if it's there.
LeRoy Cain, chairman of the mission management team, said the launch video suggests to some that Endeavour's nose took a hit. Still photos, on the other hand, show no impact.
"It's too early to speculate," Cain said late Wednesday afternoon. "The team has got a lot of work to do on that as well as other debris items."
Also, right at liftoff, something seemed to fall off the tail end of the shuttle, possibly part of a thermal tile. Later, at the 83-second mark, a piece of debris, possibly fuel-tank foam insulation, appeared to miss the shuttle's right wing.
"There's nothing that stands out in terms of things that we're worried about," Cain said.
The photographs preceding the docking will add to NASA's arsenal of data for determining whether Endeavour will be able to re-enter safely at the end of its 16-day flight, the longest space station mission ever by a shuttle. All the analysis will take several days.
Endeavour's seven astronauts began their day Wednesday with an invigorating wake-up call from Mission Control: a loud mix of rock 'n' roll music with the refrain, "Go, go Godzilla." It was dedicated to the crew's Japanese engineer, Takao Doi.
"We are ready to go and we'll have a great time today docking with the space station," Doi said.
Doi is accompanying the first piece of Japan's new space station lab, Kibo, which is Japanese for "hope." The storage compartment will be attached to the orbiting complex on Friday; it's a temporary location until the lab arrives in May.
Endeavour also is delivering a two-armed Canadian robot, named Dextre, that will be assembled during the first three spacewalks of the mission, as well as a new space station resident, Garrett Reisman. In all, five spacewalks are planned.
