Saturday, May 14, 2011

Endeavour, we are GO

OK, it took a while. A long while. But the shuttle Endeavour is ready to go on May 16, the last mission for this shuttle and the second to last for the Shuttle program.
The mission is an important one for those of us interested in how this whole universe works. STS-134 Commander Mark Kelly and his five crewmates will deliver the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer-2 (AMS), a particle detector which will be used in the search for dark matter.
COMMENT: Sending the AMS to the ISS is the kind of mission the Shuttle was made for, and why I will have to see the Shuttle go. Still left on the ground is one more important experiment, the human centrifuge. I had hoped they'd all one more mission to take that one up, as it would mean a lot for the study of long-term human response to microgravity, and it was designed only for the Shuttle. Sigh.

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