Cape Canaveral (US): NASA postponed the return of Atlantis for at least a day and examined the shuttle for damage that could prevent it from making the journey home after a mysterious object apparently fell off the ship in orbit.
Space agency officials wanted extra time to establish whether the object was a vital piece of the shuttle - such as the tiles that protect it from the blowtorch heat of re-entry and whether it harmed the spacecraft when it fell away.
"The question is: What is it? Is it something benign? Or is it something more critical we should pay attention to?" said space shuttle programme manager, Wayne Hale.
"We want to make sure we're safe to land before we commit to that rather incredible journey through the Earth's atmosphere,” he added.
The shuttle has enough supplies to stay in space until Saturday while engineers on the ground figure out whether the shuttle can safely return to Earth.
The space agency did not rule out the possibility of a space walk to make repairs or, if the spacecraft is too damaged, sending Atlantis's six crew members to take refuge in the international space station and await rescue by another shuttle - a scenario that NASA has been developing ever since the Columbia disaster in 2003.
Before the postponement, Atlantis had been scheduled to touch down just before this morning, when the weather forecast wasn't favourable for landing anyway.
The incident came near the end of what had been a nearly flawless mission devoted to restarting construction of the space station for the first time since the Columbia tragedy three and a half years ago.
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