Discovery's astronauts surveyed their ship for signs of launch damage, but the job was complicated by the failure of the space shuttle's big dish antenna.

Without the antenna, the seven astronauts have no way to send or receive big packages of information, like the images of the shuttle's wings and nose that are usually sent immediately to Mission Control.

Instead, commander Alan Poindexter and his crew had to store the data on 40-minute tapes that were fed, in turn, into a computer for digital conversion.

In all, six tapes were filled, containing 35 to 40 gigabytes of information. All that information will be relayed once the shuttle reached the International Space Station this morning, delaying analysis.

The rendezvous was expected to be trickier than usual, given the antenna trouble.

The antenna is supposed to provide radar tracking as the shuttle approaches the station, from 25 miles out.

But it still was not working early today, and Nasa gave up on it for the 215-mile-high docking.

Mission Control said the astronauts would rely on other navigation tools, and stressed the linkup would not be any more dangerous.

"We're planning on getting there on time," Mr Poindexter assured flight controllers. He said he trained for just such an event, two weeks ago back in Houston.

Flight director Richard Jones said the main effect is the one-day delay in getting the results from the survey, as well as data collected aboard Discovery during liftoff.

"The experts who look at that data and process that data and turn that data upside down, left and right ... they're very good at that," Mr Jones said. "I'm confident that once they get that data, it's going to look and feel like a normal mission at that time."

It will take about four hours to transmit all the survey data, using space station resources.