Endeavour set for a farewell mission as an era comes to end

Published on Thursday 28 April 2011 18:58

THE shuttle Endeavour is scheduled to blast off tonight on its farewell mission to the International Space Station, watched by a near-record crowd and carrying with it a $2 billion science experiment that scientists believe could yield "unimagined discoveries."

The 19-year-old orbiter will fly the penultimate mission of Nasa's shuttle programme, spending 14 days in space and putting another 5.8 million miles on the clock before being retired to a California museum.

Thousands of shuttle workers have been made redundant and thousands more will be laid off following the last two flights as America's human space flight programme enters a period of flux. The president has cancelled the programme that was to have followed the shuttle, and instead tasked the commercial space industry to come up with a replacement.

"It's like breaking up a family," said Mike Leinbach, Nasa's launch director at Kennedy Space Centre, Florida.

"It's tough to deal with it. But we're moving on and we're going to fly these last two missions safe and bring the crews home, and then that will be it."

Up to one million people are expected to watch from viewing spots around the Cape Canaveral area, while inside the space centre 400 VIPs and 1,500 media are expected along with President Barack Obama and his family.

It is not only Endeavour that the president and public will come to honour. The shuttle's crew is led by Mark Kelly, a US Navy captain and 15-year veteran of Nasa's astronaut corps, whose politician wife was the subject of an assassination attempt nearly four months ago.

Gabrielle Giffords, an Arizona congresswoman who was shot through the brain by a mentally disturbed gunman in January, is expected to join the other astronauts' families on the roof of the Launch Control Centre, three miles from the pad. It is her first trip out since she was shot. She is still working on regaining her speech and mobility, and has a chunk of her skull missing following surgery to relieve pressure on her swollen brain.

Packed in Endeavour's cargo bay is the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a $2 billion science instrument that will be installed at the International Space Station. For at least the next nine years, it will collect data that scientists hope will provide unparalleled insight into the origins and nature of the universe.

The AMS will push scientific boundaries by hunting for evidence of anti-matter and dark matter - mysterious and unseen components of the universe - and study cosmic rays emanating from stars and galaxies millions of light years beyond the Milky Way. The data it yields could prove or disprove one of the most fundamental pillars of physics: the Big Bang theory.

"This is not a run-of-the-mill mission. It has the potential to return really earth-shattering science," said Bill Gerstenmaier, Nasa's associate administrator for space operations.The project's principal investigator is a Nobel prizewinning physicist, Samuel Ting, who created the experiment with the help of 600 scientists from 56 institutions.

"The cosmos is the ultimate laboratory. From its vantage point in space, AMS will explore such issues as antimatter, dark matter and the origin of cosmic rays" he stated.

It will be only the second time in the shuttle's 30-year history that a sitting US president has attended a launch.