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Discovery's astronauts aim to land at Kennedy Space Center on Saturday before the weather at its shuttle homeport and back-up landing sites in California and New Mexico deteriorates significantly.
Now circling in an orbit some 220 miles above Earth, the astronauts are scheduled to land at the three-mile runway at KSC at 1:39 p.m. A second and final opportunity to land at KSC on Saturday would come at 3:14 p.m.
The forecast calls for scattered clouds 5,000 above the landing strip, and there is a slight chance that they could build up enough to prevent mission commander Lee Archambault from seeing the runway on final approach.
NASA in that case would be forced to forego a landing attempt, and the weather is expected to degrade significant on Sunday at KSC at two back-up landing sites -- Edwards Air Force Base in California and Northrup Strip at White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico.
"We'll keep our fingers crossed," Archambault told colleagues in NASA's Mission Control Center in Houston on Friday.
A landing on the first opportunity would come on Discovery's 201st lap around the planet -- 12 days, 17 hours and 56 minutes after its March 15 launch.
It would wind up a highly successful mission to complete assembly of the International Space Station's central truss and deliver a fourth and final set of massive American solar wings.
The shuttle crew also delivered Koichi Wakata, who is the first Japanese astronaut to carry out a long-duration expedition on the station.
Flying back aboard Discovery will be NASA astronaut Sandra Magnus, who will have tallied 134 days in space.
The weather forecast at KSC on Sunday calls for some potentially nasty weather. Meteorologists say the is a chance of electrically charged clouds, low cloud ceilings, thunderstorms and high crosswinds.
Stiff crosswinds also are forecast at Edwards that day and gusting winds would present a problem at Northrup Strip.
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