The space shuttle and its seven astronauts are delivering the $1 billion lab on behalf of Japan. They'll install the lab, with help from the space station's three residents, on Tuesday.
It's named Kibo, Japanese for hope, and is 37 feet long and weighs more than 32,000 pounds.
Shuttle commander Mark Kelly and his crew also have a new pump for the space station's malfunctioning toilet. The Russian-built toilet broke 1 1/2 weeks ago, and space officials are hopeful that this pump — from a different manufacturing batch than the spares on board — will get it working normally.
Before parking at the space station, Kelly was going to guide Discovery through a slow backflip so the station residents could photograph the shuttle's underside.
It's one of the safety measures put in place by NASA after the 2003 Columbia accident to check for launch damage.
On Sunday, the astronauts performed a cursory wing inspection using their ship's 50-foot robot arm. They surveyed the upper edges of the wings, beaming down the camera images to ground controllers, but could not check the lower edges of the wings and the nose cap because they lacked the proper laser tools.
Their laser-tipped inspection boom is at the space station, left there by the previous shuttle crew in March. They'll retrieve it and, after they depart, perform a full survey.
Discovery did not have enough room for the 50-foot boom — standard equipment on all of the previous post-Columbia missions — because of the enormous lab filling its payload bay.
About five pieces of insulating foam broke off Discovery's external fuel tank during Saturday's liftoff, and one or two of them may have hit the shuttle. NASA officials said they were not too worried because the foam losses occurred after the crucial first two minutes of the flight and therefore lacked the acceleration to do much, if any, damage.
What's more, the foam fragments looked to be thin and flimsy.
Astronaut Karen Nyberg said neither she nor her crewmates saw anything wrong as they were surveying the wings.
"To me, it looked really good," flight director Matt Abbott said from Johnson Space Center. But he cautioned: "We've got a lot of work to do to go through the data."
Discovery's fuel tank was the first one built from scratch with all of the post-Columbia safety changes. The tank, at least from the early data, looks to have performed well, said LeRoy Cain, chairman of the mission management team.
