Commander Eileen Collins guided the space shuttle Discovery to a picture-perfect docking with the international space station today, a major milestone in a mission now overshadowed by a crisis of confidence in NASA after the grounding of the shuttle fleet Wednesday.

High-resolution imagery of Discovery was taken by the space station crew as the shuttle approached the outpost. Credit: NASA Download larger image version here

Docking occurred at 7:18 a.m. EDT (1118 GMT) as the two spacecraft sailed 220 miles above the south Pacific Ocean. Working from Discovery's aft flight deck, Collins pulled off a textbook docking to cap a flawless two-day orbital chase.

"We have contact and capture," pilot James Kelly radioed as the shuttle's docking port gently contacted its counterpart on the front of the U.S. laboratory module, Destiny. After damping out post-docking oscillations, powerful latches locked the two spacecraft together.

One orbit later, at 8:50 a.m., a final hatch between Discovery and the station was cranked open and the shuttle crew floated into the Destiny module, welcomed aboard by station commander Sergei Krikalev and flight engineer John Phillips. Following naval tradition, Phillips rang a ship's bell to signal the shuttle crew's arrival.


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AUDIO: LISTEN TO TODAY'S MISSION STATUS BRIEFING MP3 FILE
VIDEO: BEHIND THE SCENES IN MISSION CONTROL FOR DOCKING PLAY
VIDEO: COMMANDER COLLINS GUIDES DISCOVERY TO DOCKING PLAY
VIDEO: DISCOVERY'S BACKFLIP AS SEEN FROM STATION PLAY
VIDEO: STATION CAMERAS SEE SHUTTLE'S APPROACH FROM BELOW PLAY
VIDEO: SHUTTLE PULLS IN FRONT OF STATION FOR DOCKING PLAY

VIDEO: CREW'S CAMCORDER VIDEO OF JETTISONED FUEL TANK PLAY

VIDEO: NASA GROUNDS SHUTTLE PROGRAM DIALUP
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AUDIO: LISTEN TO PROGRAM NEWS CONFERENCE FOR IPOD
VIDEO: WEDNESDAY MISSION STATUS BRIEFING DIAL-UP | BROADBAND
VIDEO: SHUTTLE FUEL TANK HITS BIRD AT LIFTOFF PLAY

VIDEO: AMAZING WB-57 AERIAL LAUNCH VIDEO NORTH | SOUTH PLANE
VIDEO: BEHIND THE SCENES IN MISSION CONTROL AT LAUNCH PLAY
VIDEO: OFFICIALS DESCRIBE DEBRIS EVENTS DIAL-UP | BROADBAND
AUDIO: LISTEN TO THE DEBRIS DESCRIPTION FOR IPOD

VIDEO: LAUNCH OF DISCOVERY! SHORTER | LONGER
VIDEO: FOOTAGE OF OBJECT BREAKING FREE FROM TANK PLAY
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VIDEO: ONBOARD CAMERA VIEW OF TANK SEPARATION PLAY
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The normally roomy laboratory module appeared cramped and crowded as Collins, Kelly, flight engineer Stephen Robinson, Andrew Thomas, Wendy Lawrence, Charles Camarda and Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi floated about, sharing smiles, handshakes and bear hugs with Krikalev and Phillips.

Krikalev passed out bread and salt, a traditional Russian gift for visitors, before giving his guests a safety briefing to familiarize them with evacuation routes and emergency procedures. Later today, Kelly and Lawrence, assisted by Phillips, will use the station's robot arm to pluck Discovery's orbiter boom sensor system - OBSS - out of the shuttle's cargo bay so it can be handed off to the shuttle's robot arm.

The OBSS was used Wednesday to inspect Discovery's nose cap and wing leading edge panels for signs of impact damage. The astronauts may use it for additional inspections later in the mission. But because of clearance issues with the shuttle now docked to the station, the lab's Canadian-built robot arm was required to remove it from the shuttle's cargo bay.

"We're on the space station right now, it looks absolutely fantastic," Collins radioed. "We're looking forward to several days of a lot of hard work getting the station in the best shape we can get it in."

Today's docking was the first since a linkup by the shuttle Endeavour in November 2002, the flight before Columbia blasted off on its final voyage Jan. 16, 2003.

Columbia was destroyed during re-entry 16 days later, victim of a launch-day external tank foam strike that blasted a hole in its left wing. NASA spent two-and-a-half years recovering from the disaster, focusing on fixing the external tank to make sure large pieces of foam insulation would not break off during launch.

But during Discovery's launching Tuesday, large pieces of potentially catastrophic foam broke away, graphically proving NASA and its contractor, Lockheed Martin, had failed to meet the No. 1 recommendation of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board.

It was a devastating blow to NASA, a major setback in the agency's plans to resume space station assembly. With the shuttle fleet now grounded indefinitely, some agency insiders worry the program is in danger of termination.

But NASA Administrator Michael Griffin, in an interview with CBS News earlier today, said shuttle flights will resume when the agency fixes the foam problem, however long that might take.

"Obviously, we didn't do as well as we needed to and we're not going to fly again until we're even more certain we have this problem fixed," he said. "We intend at this point to fix the foam problem and fly again as soon as we can when we are certain we've got it this time."

But he left little doubt NASA still plans to retire the shuttle fleet by 2010 as the agency transitions to a replacement rocket system intended to ferry astronauts to and from low-Earth orbit and eventually on to the moon.

"Our planning horizon at this point, per the president's direction, is to retire in 2010 at which time we believe the international space station will be complete and it will be time for the us to move on to a new human-rated system and new voyages of discovery to the moon."

Despite the concern about the shuttle program's immediate future, Discovery's crew has pressed ahead with a near flawless mission, executing a trouble-free rendezvous and docking early today.

During final approach, with the shuttle flying nose forward a few hundred feet directly below the space station, Collins manually pitched the nose up in a spectacular 360-degree maneuver that allowed Krikalev and Phillips to photograph Discovery's underbelly.

High-resolution imagery of Discovery was taken by the space station crew as the shuttle approached the outpost. Credit: NASA Download larger image version here

About a minute after launch, part of a heat-shield tile at the edge of a nose landing gear door cracked and ripped away, exposing the white interior of the insulator. Krikalev and Phillips, using 400- and 800-millimeter lenses, photographed the underside of the shuttle to give flight controllers a chance to evaluate the chipped tile and whatever other damage might be present.

While it will take photo analysts time to fully evaluate the pictures, "neither of us saw anything alarming," Phillips radioed mission control.

"They showed us some of the shots of the orbiter and from what we could tell, it looks like it's in great shape," Collins radioed later from the station.

Asked if he was confident Discovery's thermal protection system is healthy enough for a normal re-entry Aug. 7, Griffin told CBS News "we're not 100 percent sure at this point, no, but we have looked at the data from the wing leading edge impact sensors and we have not seen any evidence of an actual strike."

"Our video footage, it's very clear that that large piece of foam missed Discovery," he said. "We continue to examine the data but at this point, we think Discovery is a clean bird."