The crews of space shuttle Endeavour and the International Space Station have completed their first day as an orbital team, beginning 12 days of joint operations.

Endeavour has docked with the International space Station at 11:49 p.m. Wednesday. About an hour before docking, STS-123 Commander Dominic Gorie and Pilot Gregory H. Johnson guided the shuttle in a back flip, so station crew members can photograph its heat shield. The digital images, as many as 300, were sent to the ground for analysis.

Station crew members used digital cameras with 400 mm and 800 mm lenses to photograph Endeavour’s upper and bottom surface through windows of the Zvezda Service Module. The 400 mm lens provides up to 3 inch resolution and the 800 mm lens up to 1 inch resolution. The photography is one of several techniques used to inspect the shuttle’s thermal protection system for possible damage. Areas of special interest include the tiles, the reinforced carbon-arbon of the nose and leading edges of the wings, landing gear doors and the elevon cove. The photos were sent through the station’s Kuband communications system for analysis by systems engineers and mission managers.

Gorie then guided Endeavour to a point ahead of the station and maneuver it to a docking with Pressurized Mating Adapter No 2, at the forward end of the Harmony node.

The STS-123 and Expedition 16 crews opened the hatches between space shuttle Endeavour and the International Space Station at 1:28 a.m. EDT.

During their first day in space, Commander Dominic Gorie, Pilot Gregory Johnson and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's, Takao Doi used the shuttle’s robotic arm and its OBSS for the standard survey of Endeavour’s heat-resistant reinforced carbon-carbon and heat shield tiles.

They checked the spacecraft’s underside, nose cap and leading edges of the wings as well as hard to reach shuttle surfaces. The purpose of this inspection was to ensure that, during the vehicle’s climb to orbit, no damage occurred to the tiles that protect Endeavour from the heat of reentry. Over the next few days, engineers and flight controllers will analyze the data collected by the STS-123 crew.

The video taken during Endeavour’s liftoff have showed that something, maybe a bird, may have struck the shuttle's nose nine or 10 seconds after liftoff, but according to the NASA experts the photos are inconclusive so far. LeRoy Cain, chairman of the mission management team, said the launch video suggests to some that Endeavour's nose took a hit. "It's too early to speculate," Cain said late Wednesday afternoon. "The team has got a lot of work to do on that as well as other debris items."

Also, right at liftoff, something appeared to fall off the tail end of the shuttle, possibly part of a thermal tile. Later, at the 83-second mark, a piece of debris, possibly fuel-tank foam insulation, appeared to miss the shuttle's right wing.

"There's nothing that stands out in terms of things that we're worried about," Cain said.

During the first three spacewalks, the astronauts will install the first pressurized section, Japanese Experiment Logistics Module (ELM-PS), of the future Kibo (Hope) Japanese module and the Canadian Space Agency’s newest contribution to the station, the Special Purpose Dexterous Manipulator or Dextre.

The fourth spacewalk will be used to replace a remote power control module and test a shuttle tile repair material. The repair material test was originally scheduled for Discovery’s mission last October, but was rescheduled so that problems with the station’s solar arrays could be addressed.

The goal is to complete this test before space shuttle Atlantis flies to the Hubble Space Telescope in August. Unlike missions to the space station, Atlantis’ crew members wouldn’t be able to wait on the station for another shuttle to bring them home if Atlantis was damaged.

On the fifth spacewalk, mission specialists Robert L. Behnken and Mike Foreman will store on the station the boom that attaches to the shuttle’s robotic arm for heat shield inspections. The boom is being stored on orbit since the next shuttle will not have enough room to carry both the boom and the larger JAXA module in the cargo bay.

The crews have finished the preparations for the first of five scheduled spacewalks, which Mission Specialist Rick Linnehan and Reisman will begin at 8:23 p.m. Thursday. Shortly after Endeavour’s arrival at the station, Reisman traded places with Flight Engineer Leopold Eyharts, a European Space Agency astronaut, to join the Expedition 16 crew. Eyharts will return to Earth aboard Endeavour.

Foreman will serve as intravehicular officer, while Behnken and Eyharts will operate the station’s Canadarm2. Tasks include preparation for the ELM-PS installation and work on Dextre assembly. Doi and Gorie will subsequently install the ELM-PS on Harmony with the shuttle arm.