Discovery is shimmering in the xenon lights out at Launch Pad 39A this morning as the sun is just emerging over the horizon at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The shuttle and its six-astronaut crew are to lift off today at 4:50 p.m. EST on a mission to the International Space Station. This will be the last mission of Discovery, which has made 38 trips into space before, including the STS-31 mission in April 1990, to deploy the Hubble Space Telescope.
The rotating service structure, or RSS, was moved back to its launch position last night. Teams are not working any issues that would delay today’s liftoff. Fueling of Discovery’s external fuel tank with more than 535,000 gallons of super cold liquid hydrogen and oxygen is expected to begin at about 7:25 a.m. NASA TV coverage begins at 7:15 a.m.