The Space Shuttle Atlantis arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) on 9 February 2008, delivering the long-awaited European Space Agency (ESA) Columbus laboratory which reached space over a decade later than the original plan when the lab was approved in 1987. It was installed two days later and the joint Shuttle/ISS crews conducted three spacewalks to prepare it for scientific work. The much anticipated facility will provide a large number of microgravity research opportunities, even more than the first ISS science module Destiny which was launched exactly seven years earlier, on 7 February 2001, also onboard Atlantis. The Shuttle crew also replaced an expended nitrogen tank on the Station's P1 truss and Atlantis delivered a new ISS crew member, flight engineer Leopold Eyharts, a French ESA astronaut, who replaced NASA's Dan Tani.
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