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A number of tasks for the newest laboratory on the international space station were to be performed today by the astronauts from space shuttle Discovery. They had to fully extend the 33-foot robotic arm (the cost of which is about $1 billion). It is worth mentioning that the robotic arm has already been moved on Saturday, but only a little.

"They will do a series of motions. It will practically extend all the way out," mentioned flight director Annette Hasbrook.

When the test will reach the final stage, the robotic arm is going to be folded up and stored, so it won't be close to the windows of the laboratory. During summer the team of astronauts will carry on with robotic arm inspection and in the end the crew will use the arm to grab the storage shed that currently sits atop the laboratory.

The crew does not intend to use the arm until the final section of the lab (which is a porch for outer space experiments) will be launched into the orbit in 2009 along with a smaller robotic arm. The name of the newest 37-foot laboratory is Kibo, translated as "hope" from Japanese. It is worth mentioning that the lab was brought by Discovery and installed on the international space station last week. It is currently the biggest room on the ISS.

Later this day the crew intended to open the storage shed of the lab. It is to note that the storage shed has been sealed up from the moment when it was shifted last week to the lab from another location on the ISS. Basically, the shed is a 14-foot closet. It was brought on the ISS by another team of shuttle astronauts in March.

The crew had the goal of removing from the shed a part of the equipment required for other parts of the international space station. According to Emily Nelson, the flight director of the ISS, the shed is going to provide things that are frequently in short supply at the station.

"If you can imagine how full your house gets with stuff as you go through your life. But you can never have a garage sale and very infrequently can you take anything away. We have that problem on station. This will provide much needed storage space," she said.

On June 8, two astronauts Michael Fossum and Ronald Garan Jr. finished the final mission of Discovery, featuring a spacewalk around the ISS. They managed to replace an empty gas tank and to gather from a rotating joint, found on one of the stations solar power wings, a sample of dusty debris. Specialists at NASA hope the sample will give them an answer on why the other joint is currently out of order. The shuttle crew plans to leave the ISS on Wednesday.