Endeavour under lights at the Kennedy Space Center's Launch Pad 39A. Photo Credit/NASA Photo
Top NASA officials on Tuesday affirmed April 29 as the launch date for shuttle Endeavour’s final mission, a 14 to 16-day flight to equip the International Space Station with the $2 billion Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer and drop off external spare parts.
Launch of Endeavour from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center is scheduled for 3:47 p.m., EDT.
Veteran NASA astronaut Mark Kelly will command. His crew includes pilot Greg. H. Johnson, mission specialists Mike Fincke, Greg Chamitoff and Drew Feustel and European Space Agency astronaut Roberto Vittori of Italy.
Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA’s associate administrator for space operations, characterized the flight as complex. The mission includes four spacewalks and plans for the shuttle crew to assist with upgrades of internal life support systems. Once Endeavour reaches the space station, NASA’s Mission Management Team will consider a pair of one-day extensions to the 14-day baseline flight.
“We had a very extensive and thorough review today,” said Gerstenmaier, who chaired Tuesday’s Flight Readiness Review. “We’re ready to go fly.”
Endeavour’s primary payload, the AMS, has been under development by the United States and 15 other nations, including China, since 1994. The big particle detector will be attached to the station’s starboard solar power system truss, where it will search for evidence of elusive primordial antimatter and dark matter.
Evidence of significant amounts of the former would help to affirm the big bang, a theorized explosion that marked the creation of the universe nearly 14 billion years ago. The explosion should have created equal amounts of normal and antimatter — particles with the same mass as ordinary matter but with the opposite electrical charges, according to physicists.
Astronomers believe equally mysterious dark matter may comprise a significant percentage of the observable universe. They see evidence for unseen dark matter in the structures of galaxies. But the composition of dark matter remains a topic of speculation.
The spare parts Endeavour’s crew will drop off at the space station will help to sustain operations of the orbiting laboratory’s thermal control, communications and power systems long after the shuttle retires.
Endeavour, the youngest of NASA’s shuttle orbiters, will be launching for the 25th time.
She was assembled to replace Challenger, which was destroyed in a launch day explosion in January 1986. Endeavour entered NASA service in 1992. Endeavour helped to prolong the life of the Hubble Space Telescope and proved a workhorse in the assembly of the space station.
The timeline demands on Endeavour’s crew were so great that the station’s NASA-led partnership again dropped plans for a Soyuz “fly about” to capture a portrait of the space station with a shuttle docked. The photo shoot, which was initially proposed for the final mission of Discovery earlier this year, calls for three of the station’s astronauts to board a Soyuz capsule with cameras and undock from the station for about an hour.
The portrait may be assigned to station astronauts during the visit of shuttle Atlantis.
Atlantis is tentatively scheduled to launch on June 28 with a crew of four astronauts. Her 12-day supply mission to the station will mark the 135th and final flight of NASA’s shuttle program.