This time we drove to Titusville to try and find a place near Space View Park. This was our second shuttle launch after seeing STS 129 from the NASA Causeway in June 2009. Now that we live a mere one hour from Kennedy Space Center, we had a chance to see the launch and landing of Atlantis STS 135, the final space shuttle mission. ![]() NASA's Endeavour shuttle is currently on a 14-day mission to the ISS where it is delivering the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer-2, a particle physics detector designed to operate from the station and search for antimatter and the origin and structure of dark matter.Posted on Sunday, July 24th, 2011 at 7:51 pm CET Endeavour will reside at the California Science Center in Los Angeles and Discovery will be sent to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's Udvar-Hazy Center next to Dulles Airport in Virginia. Atlantis' new, old home will be in the Kennedy Space Center. With their 30-years of space journey behind them, NASA's three orbiters are destined for museums. laboratory module, Destiny, as well as the Joint Airlock Quest and multiple sections of the Integrated Truss structure that makes up the Station's backbone, NASA said. On STS-79, the fourth docking mission, Atlantis ferried astronaut Shannon Lucid back to Earth after her record-setting 188 days in orbit aboard Mir, NASA said.Ītlantis has delivered several vital components to the ISS, including the U.S. crew exchanges, now a common occurrence on the International Space Station. The missions to Mir included the first on-orbit U.S. When linked, Atlantis and Mir together formed the largest spacecraft in orbit at the time. NASA said Atlantis pioneered the Shuttle-Mir missions, flying the first seven missions to dock with the Russian space station. An array of onboard science experiments took place during most missions to further enhance space research in low Earth orbit. Department of Defense.Īccording to NASA, the craft has served as the on-orbit launch site Magellan and Galileo, as well as the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory. 3, 1985, STS 51-J was a classified payload for the U.S. Weighing in at 151,315 pounds when it rolled out of the assembly plant, the shuttle was nearly 3.5 tons lighter than Columbia. Engineers want to understand why the pump failed and improve designs for future spacecraft.Ītlantis has had a long history. Meanwhile, Atlantis' crew is slated to bring back an ammonia pump that recently failed on the ISS. In fact NASA recently began to solicit proposals for space gas stations, or what it calls an In-Space Cryogenic Propellant Storage and Transfer Demonstration that will lay the ground work for humans to safely reach multiple destinations, including the Moon, asteroids, Lagrange points and Mars. Such capabilities are seen as crucial for long-term space success. ![]() The shuttle will also carry an experiment designed to demonstrate and test the tools and technologies needed to robotically refuel satellites in space. Raffaello is about 21 feet long and 15 feet in diameter, weighing almost 4.5 tons. The stringers located where the liquid oxygen tank meets the intertank were modified with extra material to add strength and do not require inspection, NASA said.Ītlantis' 12-day mission is set to include delivery of the Raffaello cargo module to the International Space Station. ![]() X-ray inspection of the intertank stringers provides additional confidence that there are no stringer cracks in Atlantis' tank. Mission managers want to X-ray aluminum support beams, known as stringers, located where the liquid hydrogen tank meets the intertank.Ĭracked intertank stringers were found during shuttle Discovery's first launch attempt in November 2010 and delayed its launch until the problem was resolved. For example, NASA says there are several non-standard activities, including a tanking test followed by an X-ray inspection of a section of the external fuel tank, which may affect Atlantis' processing.
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