"Welcome back Discovery and congratulations on a great mission," ground control said at the completion of the 13-day mission that paved the way for the resumption of regular shuttle flights in the wake of the 2003 Columbia disaster.

"We're going to see our families now," Discovery Commander Steven Lindsey said after top officials of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration welcomed the six crew members on the ground.

NASA heaved a sigh of relief earlier as a parachute deployed from the shuttle's rear, and Discovery came to a full stop on the 4,572-meter (15,000-foot) Kennedy Space Center runway on the Atlantic seashore.

"The final entry was beautiful," Lindsey said.

The last moments of a shuttle mission are among the most critical, and it was upon re-entering into the Earth's atmosphere that Columbia had burst into flames on February 1, 2003.

As it slices through the atmosphere, a shuttle is no longer powered by engines, but glides toward the landing facility. It touches down at about 350 kilometers (220 miles) per hour.

NASA hoped Discovery's successful mission would help ease concerns over the shuttle program that have persisted since the Columbia disaster, and pave the way for a resumption of regular flights in August.

Like last year's first post-Columbia flight, the latest shuttle voyage was largely aimed at improving safety of the shuttle missions that are critical to plans to complete construction of the International Space Station (ISS) by 2010.

NASA says the orbiting space station is a key component in US ambitions to send astronauts back to the moon, and eventually to Mars.

During their 13 days in space, astronauts Mike Fossum and Piers Sellers performed three spacewalks to test shuttle repair techniques and fix equipment needed to continue building the ISS.

The crew delivered critical supplies and removed vast quantities of trash, discarded material and experiment results from the orbiting laboratory.

They also dropped off European Space Agency astronaut Thomas Reiter of Germany, who became the space station's third resident.

Lindsey said the mission's two main objectives were accomplished. "We are ready to go assemble the station, we are ready to start flying shuttles on a more regular basis."

After examining the outside of the space vehicle he had called home for 13 days, Lindsey said he had never seen a shuttle in such a good condition upon return from a mission.

The flight was the second since the Columbia disaster and the first since the three-shuttle fleet was grounded a year ago because the shuttle's external tank had shed a large chunk of foam on take-off.

A similar piece of foam insulation had peeled off on Columbia's doomed flight, piercing the shuttle's heat shield and causing the orbiter to break apart as it returned to Earth.

The tank shed some debris this time around, when Discovery blasted off from KSC on July 4, but NASA found no damage on Discovery's heat shield.

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