The shuttle Atlantis approached the orbiting International Space Station for one last hitch-up Sunday, on its final space voyage before the entire 30-year US shuttle program shuts down for good.
About an hour before the shuttle's scheduled docking with the ISS at 11:07 am (1507 GMT), the spacecraft began its habitual slow backflip so that crew could take pictures of its heat shields before clasping onto the lab.
"Poetry in motion as the shuttle begins the last R-bar pitch maneuver in shuttle program history," said a commentator at mission control in Houston, referring to the nickname of the nine-minute backflip, or rendezvous pitch maneuver.
The one-degree-per-second somersault allows ISS crew members to snap high-resolution photos as they check the shuttle for any damage incurred during takeoff.
Atlantis began its 12-day journey on Friday with a flawless liftoff from Kennedy Space Center that was watched locally by hundreds of thousands of tourists, and marked the last-ever blastoff of the three decade long program.
The flight marks the end of an era for NASA, leaving Americans with no actively operating government-run human spaceflight program and no method for sending astronauts to space until private industry comes up with a new capsule, likely by 2015 at the earliest.
Four US crew are aboard the shuttle, which is on a mission to resupply the international research outpost one last time before the shuttles retire.
Atlantis is carrying 8,000 pounds (3,000 kilograms) of supplies, which the combined crew of 10 -- four aboard the shuttle's STS-135 mission and six aboard the ISS as part of Expedition 28 -- will transfer during the mission. A failed ammonia pump will then be transferred to the shuttle payload bay for return to Earth.
With the shuttle program ending, only Russia's three-seat Soyuz capsules will be capable of carrying astronauts to the ISS at a cost of more than $50 million per seat.
Monday will be occupied with setting up the transfer of the Raffaello multipurpose module, which holds the extra supplies, from the shuttle to the Earth-facing side of the station's Harmony module. A spacewalk by ISS crew members Ron Garan and Mike Fossum, both US astronauts, is set for Tuesday. The duo has already stepped out together on three spacewalks, which took place in June 2008 as part of the STS-124 mission that delivered the Japanese Kibo lab to the ISS.
On Saturday, the Atlantis crew performed the first inspection of the craft's thermal protection system, the outer barrier that protects it from the searing heat upon re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere.
Crew members used the shuttle's robotic arm to maneuver a 50-foot (15-meter) long orbiter boom sensor system for a closer look at the heat shield tiles on the shuttle's wing and nose cap, which NASA described as "standard operations."
Careful inspections of the shuttle body have become a primary activity since the space shuttle Columbia was destroyed upon re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere in 2003.
A panel of experts concluded that a heat shield tile on the craft's wing was damaged at blast-off, fatally compromising the craft's re-entry protection and killing all seven crew on board.
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