Atlantis docks with International Space Station for last time

Jul 10, 2011, 15:52 GMT

Washington - For the final time in the programme's history, a space shuttle docked with the International Space Station (ISS) Sunday.

The US space agency NASA unfurled a series of statistics to mark the last docking operation: it was Atlantis' 12th docking with a space station and the 46th time a shuttle docked with either the ISS or the Russian Mir station.

It was also the 86th space shuttle rendezvous operation and the 164th proximity operation for a shuttle, in which the vessel works close to another spacecraft.

The four-man crew of the space shuttle and the six-man ISS crew are expected to open the hatches between their vessels at about 1719 GMT for the traditional welcome ceremony.

NASA reported that the combined crew of 10 would then begin more than a week of work. The main aim of the 12-day space flight is to deliver four tons of provisions and equipment to the human outpost in space.

Transferring the supplies to the ISS is expected to take a long time, meaning that the timing of Atlantis' planned July 20 return trip to Earth could slip by a day.

The July 20 data had been chosen because it is 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.