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Space shuttle Discovery finally made its way back to Earth early Tuesday, safely landing in California after bad weather scuttled earlier plans to bring the craft down in Florida.

The landing took place just after 8:11 a.m. EDT at the Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert.

"Welcome home, friends," astronaut Ken Ham at Mission Control in Houston told the seven-member Discovery crew as the shuttle came to a halt on the runway..

"Congratulations on a job well done."

Almost immediately after what observers called a "picture perfect" landing, attention quickly turned to how soon the next flight would be scheduled.

NASA has halted future flights after a piece of foam broke loose from a redesigned fuel tank during liftoff. The foam did not hit the craft, but the situation renewed concerns that the agency had not completely resolved problems that had doomed Columbia 2½ years earlier.

Speaking with reporters following Tuesday's touchdown, NASA officials refused to speculate on how quickly the next flight would be scheduled. The agency is also looking into why two so-called gap fillers came loose during the mission.

"We're not going to go until we're ready to go," NASA administrator Michael Griffin told reporters.

Earlier in the day, grainy images from the landing site showed the Discovery's approach to the runway as observers around the world held their breath ahead of touchdown.

The landing was the first since 2003, when the Columbia disintegrated up re-entry.

"Main gear touchdown," controllers said as the craft touched down.

"Drag chute deploy ... and Discovery is home."

After exiting the craft, flight commander Eileen Collins described the mission as "fantastic."

"We are so glad to be able to come back and say it was successful," she said. "This is a wonderful moment for all of us."

In Montreal, Canadian astronaut Marc Garneau described the touchdown as a "textbook landing."

"Everything went totally normally," he told CBC Newsworld.

"I think this is the ends of a very long road, a long and painful road for the United States, particularly for NASA. In a sense, it's like falling off your horse as was the case when Columbia broke up 2½ years ago, and now finally NASA is back up on its horse."

The mission had originally been scheduled to last 12 days, but weather conditions delayed the shuttle's earlier landing efforts and pushed the length of the exercise to 14 days.

Earlier Tuesday, unstable weather at Florida's Cape Canaveral — including small pockets of thunderstorms near the landing strip — had prompted NASA's Mission Control to send Discovery to the backup touchdown site in California.

The Discovery's return was at one point set for Sunday, but that target was later pushed to Monday. Poor weather conditions at the start of the week, however, led Mission Control to tell Discovery's crew to orbit the Earth for one more day, leading to Tuesday's touchdown.

The Discovery's landing marks the first for a space shuttle since Columbia disintegrated while re-entering the atmosphere.

The shuttle was redirected after controllers first told Ms. Collins that conditions appeared to be improving in Florida but then deteriorated.

Ms. Collins told controllers she was not surprised by the switch.

"I've been in your shoes many times, so I understand," she told Mission Control.

The crew changed into pressurized orange flight suits, helmets, gloves and boots worn during launch and landing. Each astronaut also strapped on a parachute pack, including a life raft, sea dye and two litres of emergency drinking water.

NASA instructed the astronauts to continue landing preparations and begin drinking large amounts of fluids, which are necessary to ease the transition from the weightless environment of space back to Earth's gravity.

Discovery spent nine days linked to the space station, delivering supplies to the orbiting lab and taking away broken equipment and trash.

As a result of Columbia, Discovery's crew performed intense inspections of their ship on five different days. Astronauts also did a spacewalk to test new repair techniques and replaced a failed gyroscope on the station during another spacewalk.

In a third spacewalk, two protruding thermal tile fillers were removed from Discovery's belly. Engineers feared the material could cause dangerous overheating during re-entry.

With Associated Press