{"id":2163,"date":"2011-05-16T10:57:47","date_gmt":"2011-05-16T10:57:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=2163"},"modified":"2011-05-16T10:57:47","modified_gmt":"2011-05-16T10:57:47","slug":"endeavour_is_up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2011\/05\/16\/endeavour_is_up\/","title":{"rendered":"Endeavour Is Up"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"STS-134_endeavour-launch.jpg\"Photo credit: Pat Benic\/UPI\/Newscom<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n

I can’t believe something as important to me as the penultimate shuttle launch slipped my mind, but somehow it did: I forgot that Endeavour<\/i>‘s rescheduled launch date was today, so I was caught off-guard this morning by the news that she had blasted off on her final mission, designated STS-134, at 8:56 a.m. EDT, or just before I got up at 7 a.m. mountain time. The official launch video, for those who enjoy such things, is here<\/a>. (For some reason, NASA has disabled embedding on the video; I have no idea why, considering Discovery<\/i>‘s final launch clip was — and still is — readily available<\/a>.) The vid is somewhat disappointing — it’s almost all overexposed footage from the fish-eye cam on the top of the external fuel tank, with the earth appearing as a big white crescent in the background and the tank itself nearly lost in the glare — but there is some interesting stuff at about 6:00, when the shuttle rolls to reorient itself to Earth, and at 8:45, when the tank is jettisoned and the orbiter lifts free. Watch closely during that sequence; you can actually see puffs of gas from the shuttle’s maneuvering thrusters.<\/p>\n

This is the 25th flight for Endeavour<\/i>, which is the youngest of the shuttle fleet, and also, I believe, the lightest in weight. (Interesting tangent: I read an interview not too long ago with one of the engineers who designed the shuttles — sorry, I’ve lost the link and the guy’s name — and he said they were intended to go 100 flights each and in his opinion, they are still capable of doing so. Just a little food for thought…) Named after Captain Cook’s sailing ship HMS Endeavour<\/i>, she was constructed as a replacement for the destroyed Challenger<\/i>, flying for the first time in 1992, and was the first shuttle to make a service call to the Hubble Space Telescope. She also carried the first American-built segment of the International Space Station.<\/p>\n

On this flight, Endeavour <\/i>is carrying spare parts for the ISS, as well as a scientific package called the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS). For something with such a dry name, the AMS actually sounds pretty exciting, or at least potentially so; it’s a collection of eight different instruments designed to look for clues to the origins of the universe, including the mysterious substances known as dark matter and anti-matter. If those long-theorized things actually exist, the AMS is supposed to be able to find them. Endeavour<\/i>‘s crew will make four spacewalks to install all this stuff. The mission is scheduled to last 16 days, with a middle-of-the-night landing in the wee hours of June 1.<\/p>\n

One final word about the photo at the top: Endeavour <\/i>launched under an overcast sky this morning, leading to some very cool video<\/a>s of her disappearing into the clouds and at least one really awesome photo<\/a> of her punching through the cloud deck above. Man, I love this stuff…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Photo credit: Pat Benic\/UPI\/Newscom I can’t believe something as important to me as the penultimate shuttle launch slipped my mind, but somehow it did: I forgot that Endeavour‘s rescheduled launch date was today, so I was caught off-guard this morning by the news that she had blasted off on her final mission, designated STS-134, at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-final-frontier"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2163"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2163\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}