Endeavour to Fly Over JPL Today

More than 21 years after rolling out of Rockwell International's Palmdale, California-based assembly facility, the space shuttle Endeavour has returned to the Golden State today, September 21.

At around 11:30 am PDT (18:30 GMT), the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft (SCA) that moves the orbiter around will fly very low over Pasadena, where the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory is located.

NASA decided to use this moment to acknowledge the extremely important contributions that the JPL made to the Space Shuttle Program, and to the US space program, in general. One of them was the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2, which Endeavour astronauts installed on Hubble many years ago.

Without this instrument, the now-iconic space observatory would have not been of much use to astronomers, due to an error in its primary mirror. Overall, five shuttle missions extended its life for more than 21 years.