The space shuttle Endeavour made its way toward the International Space Station on Tuesday after brightening the early morning skies in a launching from Cape Canaveral, Fla.
Endeavour lifted off at 2:28 a.m. Eastern time. From the perspective of American time zones, the crew is working the night shift, waking in the afternoon and working until the next morning.

James Hartsfield, a spokesman for the Johnson Space Center, said that the work schedule for any mission is determined largely by the time of the launching, which is in turn determined by a complex set of factors that includes orbital mechanics.

Much of the crew’s second day — after being awakened at 4:29 p.m. by the jazzy piano of Vince Guaraldi’s “Linus and Lucy” — is devoted to checking the spacesuits that will be used in spacewalks during the mission, and to the meticulous examination of the delicate tiles and panels that make up the shuttle’s heat shield. The inspection is performed with the shuttle’s robotic arm and a special sensor boom that extends its reach.

The inspection is especially important on this mission because the night launching reduced the ability of the cameras to detect debris. Mission mangers informed the crew that one piece of debris was observed soaring by the shuttle’s right wing 83 seconds into the launching and apparently did not hit it. In addition, there was a possible impact with something, although at this point it is unclear what, 10 seconds after the liftoff.

Teams on the ground have been studying problems that cropped up during the climb to orbit: the failure of an equipment cooling system that is primarily used when the payload bay doors are closed during ascent and landing and a loss of some capability of the ground team to monitor the activity of the shuttle’s thrusters.

In a news conference on Tuesday morning, the leader of the mission management team, LeRoy Cain, said that neither issue was a serious problem.

The cooling system, the flash evaporator system, has a backup unit and either can do the job, Mr. Cain said. The problem has come up before, and the primary unit is likely to come back online before the end of the mission.

As for the thruster system, the problem affects only the use of a single small thruster, one of six used for fine-tuning propulsion. Specialists on the ground “have a work-around that they are verifying,” Mr. Hartsfield said.

The main goals of the mission are delivering part of a new Japanese science laboratory to the station and a two-armed robotic assistant named Dextre that will be able to take on some of the outside tasks that currently require a spacewalking human to perform. The mission includes five spacewalks to connect the module to the station and to assemble the robot, which was made in Canada.

The spacewalks will also be used to test a new tile repair technique and to inspect a damaged rotary joint that is designed to keep the solar panels that power the station facing the sun.

The commander for this mission is Dominic L. Gorie, a retired Navy captain, and the pilot is Col. Gregory H. Johnson of the Air Force. Other members of the crew are Richard M. Linnehan; Capt. Michael J. Foreman of the Navy; Maj. Robert L. Behnken of the Air Force; Takao Doi, a Japanese astronaut; and Garrett E. Reisman, an astronaut who will be staying aboard the station for long-term duty. He will take the place of Gen. Léopold Eyharts, a French astronaut who has lived aboard the station since last month.