Then there will be a string of spacewalks – the last spacewalks to be performed by a shuttle crew – dedicated to getting the station in the best possible shape for the end of the space shuttle program. And some of the other aspects of Endeavour’s mission will help ensure that the station is able to continue providing a home for it and the many other science experiments going on in space.Īfter AMS is installed on station’s truss during the fourth day of the mission, a pallet of spare parts will be added to the space station on the mission’s flight day 5. Thanks to the extension of the International Space Station program, the AMS will be sifting through the cosmos for years after Endeavour has retired. Meanwhile several telescopes are already in space, but they can only measure light, not particles. It’s a new area of investigation for International Space Station science, and the only experiment of its type in the universe although there are detectors on the ground trying to answer the same questions, they’re limited to the particles that make it through the Earth’s atmosphere, or that they create themselves. “And those things will lead to potential new areas of study, new areas of science and maybe even redefine some of the physics books.” “I am quite confident that once we start measuring data in space, we will find things that we never anticipated,” NASA’s AMS Project Manager Trent Martin said. And that’s just what the scientists know to look for. It will search for clues on what the universe is made of and how it began, the origin of dark matter, antimatter and strangelets, pulsars, blazers and gamma ray bursters. The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer is a state-of-the-art, high energy particle physics experiment built in Geneva by a collaboration of 16 different countries. It is, without a doubt, going to continue to rewrite our future as we try to figure out our past.” It’s bigger than a VW bug, and it will be able to look at things that the other observatories aren’t even looking at. “They’ve been working on this for well over 15 years now. “The AMS is an amazing story all by itself,” said Gary Horlacher, lead space shuttle flight director for the mission. On STS-134, however, it will help push boundaries of a different sort as it delivers a new, cutting edge science experiment to the space station: the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. And in its cargo bay, the first two pieces of the International Space Station were joined together. Its airlock is the only one to have seen three spacewalkers exit through it for a single spacewalk. Its STS-67 mission set a length record almost two full days longer than any shuttle mission before it. Space shuttle Endeavour has spent 19 years pushing boundaries, and its final mission will allow that legacy to live on.Īmong Endeavour’s missions was the first to include four spacewalks, and then the first to include five.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |