Friday saw the gentle docking of the 120-ton space shuttle Endeavor with the International Space Station! After the docking, guided by Commander Mark Polansky - who was manually flying the shuttle from the aft flight deck -, the two spacecraft sailed 220 miles above the Australian coast at five miles per second.

Prior to the docking with the space station, when the orbiter was nearly 600 feet directly below the space station, Polansky guided it through a 360-degree nine-minute back flip as the two spacecraft crossed the Atlantic Ocean – thereby allowing the lab crew to take pictures of the orbiter's protective heat shield with 400mm and 800mm telephoto lenses.

Upon docking, Polansky said in a Twitter message downlinked to the Internet: “Docked successfully w/ISS a few minutes ago.”

The ‘space shuttle-space station’ hook-up was a momentous occasion, with the biggest ever crew of 13 members coming together ‘under one roof’ in the orbit; beating the earlier record number of 10 members together at one place! Though there have been 13 people in the orbit earlier too, they were scattered in separate spacecraft.

The 13 crew members in the orbit - six full-time station crew members and seven shuttle astronauts – also happen to be the most diverse space gathering ever. There ‘twelve men, one woman’ crew includes seven Americans, two Russians, two Canadians, one Japanese and one Belgian!