Her remarkable recovery and his decision to continue as the mission's commander have added an element of human drama to the mission rarely seen while a crew is still on the ground. Gabrielle Giffords (D) of Arizona, who was shot and gravely injured during a meet-and-greet with constituents in Tucson in January. "I was hoping, and planning, and made a T-shirt with a space shuttle on it with markers because they weren't out in the stores yet."Įndeavour's return also may mark the beginning of a more peaceful period for mission commander Mark Kelly and his wife, Rep. It wasn't even built yet," he recalled during a post-flight press conference. "I was an 8- or 9-year-old kid that wanted to fly on this new space-shuttle thing. He spent two tours in the International Space Station, traveling to and from each time on a Russian Soyuz.įor him, this final trip on the shuttle was a childhood dream come true. Indeed, this was a record-setting mission for Finke, who now has logged more time in space than any other US astronaut. The fifth "went to heaven," Fincke told controllers at the time. Mission specialists Mike Fincke and Andrew Feustel manged to snag four of the would-be float-aways. That task included an unexpected game of "grab that bolt." Five bolts from a joint's thermal cover came loose unexpectedly and began to drift away. The mission included the shuttle program's last four spacewalks – one an eight-hour marathon on May 22 that included performing a lube job on two large joints that rotate the station's solar panels. Now, "to see it there and actually taking data is special," he says. "There were times when we weren't sure it was going to fly" as NASA scaled back its plans for the shuttles after the Columbia disaster in 2003, says William Gerstenmaier, NASA's associate administrator for space operations. Like a major department store that "anchors" a shopping mall, the AMS has become the high-profile tenant on the space station, marking the outpost's transition from "under construction" to "open for business" as a long-term, national-laboratory-class research facility. Researchers also are looking for signatures in the detector that can help solve a longstanding puzzle over why the universe appears to have so little antimatter, when matter and antimatter should have been created in equal amounts as the universe emerged from the big bang – the sudden release of pent-up energy that cosmologists say spawned the cosmos.Īnd the detector will provide the most detailed look yet at the full spectrum of cosmic rays – essentially the nuclei of atoms – that astronauts would face as NASA prepares to explore destinations beyond low-Earth orbit. Within three or four hours of its installation, the detector began returning data that the science team – researchers from some 60 institutions in 16 countries – will pore over for evidence of dark matter, estimated to comprise 83 percent of all the matter in the universe. The mission's centerpiece was the installation of the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), a 7.4-ton particle detector put together by an international collaboration headed by physicist Samuel Ting, a Nobel laureate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. With both operations going on simultaneously, "it's been a heck of a month in the last four hours," quipped Michael Moses, the shuttle program's launch integration manager, during a briefing after Endeavour's return. The spot where its nose wheel stopped will be marked by a commemorative plaque on the side of the shuttle runway.Īs if to pass the baton to the shuttle Atlantis, which is being prepared for the shuttle program's final launch no earlier than July 8, Endeavour touched down at about the time technicians finished rolling Atlantis out to launch pad 39A and secured it to its supports there. With its career over, Endeavour will be decommissioned and shipped to the California Science Center in Los Angeles for display. The space shuttle Endeavour and its six-member crew glided to a flawless predawn landing at the Kennedy Space Center Wednesday morning – capping a 16-day mission as well as Endeavour's 19-year career as an orbiting space plane.ĭuring the mission, the crew traveled to the International Space Station and installed a $2 billion particle physics experiment, delivered a pallet piled with spare parts, and performed a range of maintenance tasks aimed at preparing the station for life after shuttles.
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