Today in Orbit: Heavy Lifting Begins

Discovery's mission begins in earnest today after a successful rendezvous with the International Space Station on Tuesday.

At 8:43 a.m., Houston's Mission Control Center will play a wake-up song for the seven shuttle astronauts.

Tuesday's song was played for Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata, who later that day became a member of the space station's crew. He exchanged places with Sandra Magnus.

The two crews - seven shuttle astronauts and three station residents - will then get ready for one of the mission's crucial tasks.

Starting around 11:15 a.m., they'll use station and shuttle robotic arms to lift a 31,000-pound girder, called the Starboard 6 truss, from Discovery's payload bay and position it near the end of the station backbone's starboard side.

The daylong operation involves two hand-offs of the truss between robotic arms.

It will leave the truss in position for final connections to be made during the mission's first spacewalk on Thursday.

At 10:38 p.m., spacewalkers Steve Swanson and Ricky Arnold will start their pre-spacewalk "campout," sleeping in the Quest airlock at a reduced atmospheric pressure. The procedure is designed to minimize the chance of decompression sickness.

Check out the rest of the 13-day mission's highlights in this NASA TV schedule.

You can watch live coverage of all the events here at The Flame Trench. Just click on the NASA TV picture on the right side of this page to launch a NASA TV viewer.

And refresh this page for updates throughout the day.

IMAGES: Click to enlarge the images grabbed from NASA TV. At NASA's Mission Control Center late Tuesday, a map tracked the orbit of the docked space shuttle Discovery and International Space Station. Below, flight controllers tracked the mission at their consoles.