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The ship and its crew of four are now bound for the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and a landing that will occur just before sunrise, local time (0556 EDT; 0956 GMT; 1056 BST).
At "wheel-stop", Atlantis will complete its 13-day mission to the space station; and, more significantly, close the book on Nasa's shuttle programme.
Atlantis, like Discovery and Endeavour before it, is being retired.
The US space agency is turning to the private sector for future astronaut transport services, hoping that a number of commercial ventures will emerge in the coming years to ferry crews to and from the low-Earth orbit.
In the interim, it will rely the Russians to take its people into space.
Atlantis has taken the first of the two opportunities it had to come home on Thursday.
Forecasters said the weather outlook would be "very favourable" and so mission managers had no hesitation in grabbing their earliest chance to land, even though, at 40 minutes before sunrise, there will be little light for shuttle fans to see the ship sweep in over Florida's Space Coast.
Commander Chris Ferguson will be at the controls for the final approach, with pilot Doug Hurley beside him. Mission specialists Sandy Magnus and Rex Walheim will be sitting directly behind on the flight deck.
The de-orbit track brings Atlantis in from the southern Pacific, across El Salvador and the Gulf of Mexico, across Florida and the city of Titusville before a hard bank to the left to put the ship on a line to Runway 15 at Kennedy.
Touch-down is sure to be wound up with plenty of emotion - not least because it will trigger a big lay-off of contractor staff that have supported shuttle operations. More than 3,000 people will be let go within days.
The programme itself does not officially end for a month, but even then it is likely to take a couple of years to close all activities, such as the archiving of decades of shuttle engineering data.
For Atlantis, its retirement will be spent as a static display at the Kennedy visitors complex.
Its career statistics at wheel-stop should read 33 flights, 307 days in space, logging 4,848 orbits, for a total distance travelled of 202,673,974km (125,935,769 miles).
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