NASA Shuttle Atlantis docks with ISS on final mission

Atlantis docks with space station on final mission

Space shuttle Atlantis is photographed from the International Space Station prior to docking. Image credit: NASA

Space shuttle Atlantis is photographed from the International Space Station prior to docking. Image credit: NASA The shuttle Atlantis has linked up with the International Space Station (ISS) for the final rendezvous of its 25-year career, ahead of a first space walk set for Monday.

NASA said Atlantis and its crew of six astronauts successfully docked with the orbiting space lab at 1428 GMT Sunday about 220 miles (350 kilometers) above the South Pacific.

Its arrival was not without drama as a piece of debris threatened to force Mission Control to order the space station to perform an emergency maneuver to avoid a collision.

As things turned out the unidentified piece of space debris passed by safely some five miles away from the docking procedure and no special operation was required.

After an hour spent checking the soundness of the seal, the shuttle and station crews opened the hatches and held a traditional welcome ceremony before beginning preparations for the first of three planned spacewalks.

NASA said that three station crew members snapped 398 photographs of Atlantis's all-important heat shield on Sunday.

"The images were taken as the shuttle performed a back-flip prior to docking... and were sent down to Earth for analysis," the US space agency said in a statement.

Mission Specialists Garrett Reisman and Steve Bowen were "'camping out' in the Quest airlock overnight to purge nitrogen from their circulatory system. The pair are preparing for the first of three spacewalks which occurs Monday at 8:15 am (1215 GMT) and is scheduled to last 6.5 hours," NASA added.

The mission is the 32nd and final scheduled voyage for Atlantis, which first launched in 1985 and has logged some 115 million miles over a career spanning a quarter of a century.

Only two more shuttle launches remain -- one in September for Discovery and the final blast off for Endeavour in November -- before the curtain falls on this era of human spaceflight.

The United States will then rely on Russia to take astronauts to the station aboard three-seater Soyuz spacecraft until a new fleet of commercial space taxis is operational.