Tuesday, May 1, 2001 - 6 a.m. EDT

With the Kennedy Space Center reporting cloud cover, showers and gusty winds and with forecasters calling for more of the same today and tomorrow, flight controllers began focusing on bringing Endeavour home to a landing at Edwards Air Force Base later today.

The first opportunity of the day to land Endeavour at the Florida spaceport has already been passed up and flight controllers continue to plan for a landing on the second and final opportunity to land at Kennedy today. But spacecraft communicators told Endeavour's crewmembers that if a second Florida waveoff occurs, they likely would land at Edwards later today.

Two opportunities to land at Edwards are available today. For the first, the deorbit burn would occur at 11:03 a.m. central time with landing at 12:11 p.m. The second would see a deorbit burn at 12:39 p.m. and touchdown at 1:47 p.m. Forecasters said weather at Edwards is ideal.

Endeavour, which was launched April 19, brought an advanced and more powereful robotic arm, Canadarm2, to the International Space Station. The shuttle also delivered to the station more than 2700 kgs. of equipment and supplies, much of it transported in the Italian-built Multipurpose Logistics Module named Raffaello. Among equipment aboard Raffaello were two news scientific experiment racks for the space station's U.S. laboratory Destiny.

Endeavour's crew, Commander Kent Rominger, Pilot Jeff Ashby and Mission Specialists Chris Hadfield of the Canadian Space Agency, John Phillips, Scott Parazynski, Umberto Guidoni of the European Space Agency and Cosmonaut Yuri Lonchakov, were awakened at 12:48 a.m. by "Truth", performed by Spandau Ballet. The wakeup music was for Rominger, requested by his family.