At 10:28 a.m. EDT, Commander Ken Ham backed space shuttle Atlantis into pressurized mating adapter #2 on the International Space Station’s Harmony node. The two spacecraft were flying about 220 miles up over the South Pacific at the time they docked.
The shuttle and station crews will open hatches and hold the traditional welcome ceremony at about 12:30 p.m. Atlantis’ crew will be working with Expedition 23 Commander Oleg Kotov and Russian Flight Engineers Alexander Skvortsov and Mikhail Kornienko, Soichi Noguchi of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, and NASA’s T.J. Creamer and Tracy Caldwell Dyson.
About an hour after hatches are open, Caldwell Dyson and Mission Specialist Piers Sellers will use the station’s robotic arm to move the Integrated Cargo Carrier from the payload bay to the station’s mobile transporter. This will enable the carrier and its attached hardware to be prepositioned for use throughout the mission.
Mission Specialists Garrett Reisman, Michael Good and Steve Bowen will transfer the spacesuits and spacewalk equipment over to the station’s Quest airlock and begin setting up for the first spacewalk.