Atlantis crew busy on shuttle's swansong space voyage

Jul 9, 2011, 15:53 GMT

Cape Canaveral, Florida - The crew on board Atlantis got to work on Saturday, a day after their craft was propelled into space in the final space shuttle lift-off.

The astronauts began with a six-hour examination of the shuttle's heat shield - a routine operation after the Columbia shuttle disintegrated on re-entry into the earth's atmosphere due to nicks in the heat shield in 2003, killing all seven on board.

Initial results showed that the thermal shield on the Atlantis was intact.

The astronauts' day began at 3:59am (7:59 GMT), when the three men and one woman were woken by the song Viva la Vida by British band Coldplay.

On Sunday, Atlantis is to be the last US shuttle to dock with the International Space Station (ISS) for the foreseeable future.

The main aim of the 12-day space flight is to deliver four tonnes of provisions and equipment to the human outpost in space.

The crew and the team onboard the ISS will need a long time to unload the shuttle, meaning that its return schedule could slip by a day.

The return of the Atlantis is currently scheduled for July 20, the anniversary of the first moon landing.

The astronauts are also due to bring home a heavy defective cooling pump from the ISS, a transport that only a shuttle can perform. In future, this will no longer be possible.

The swansong voyage of the Atlantis carries an additional risk as its sibling shuttles Endeavour and Discovery have already been retired. In case of an emergency, the astronauts would need to be rescued by smaller Russian Soyuz spacecraft, one at a time.

For this reason, only four astronauts are on board the Atlantis, compared to the usual eight.