The shuttle Discovery's seven astronauts are scheduled to land today at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, unless a forecast of rain forces them to stay in orbit another day. The landing at Cape Canaveral is now scheduled for 1248 GMT, but NASA has already warned on Sunday about the possibility of rain, so that would delay it for one day.

"It's always nice to spend some time in orbit and we hope that the comrades in the (operations center), Houston and Florida will make every effort to take us home when time permits," said astronaut Alan Poindexter, manager the mission, during a series of interviews broadcast by NASA.

The regulations prohibit the U.S. space agency if there is any landing rainstorms within a radius of 48 kilometers from the runway, because rain can damage the heat tiles of the spacecraft, among other risks.

The Discovery will in the end, only have two opportunities to try their landing and flight director for NASA, Bryan Lunney told reporters on Sunday will evaluate the weather conditions early in the morning.

The NASA officials also enabled a track in California where the landing was postponed until Tuesday.

According to Lunney, the re-entry of the shuttle will be visible in much of North America, on its way from northwest to southeast, toward Florida. In fact, you can only see a ray of light that flies through the sky at high speed.

In one of it's last trips to space shuttle Discovery completed a two-week mission to the International Space Station (ISS), where they took more than seven million tons of supplies and equipment.