14 DAY TRIAL // The fifth and the final orbiter vehicle of NASA, Endeavor, was cleared yesterday for the liftoff which is scheduled to take place on March 11. It will be the second flight of the space shuttle Endeavor since the Columbia disaster in 2005, which disintegrated during its re-entry into Earth's atmosphere. Endeavor has the mission of transporting JAXA's space module Kibo to the International Space Station. The liftoff will take place at 2:28 a.m. EST from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Alternatively, the 21th flight of the Endeavor space shuttle will represent the shortest pause between two space missions since 2005, as last week the space shuttle Atlantis returned to the surface of the Earth after carrying the space laboratory Columbus to the International Space Station. The crew will be composed of a complement of seven, of which two rookies, the Japanese astronaut Takao Doi who participated previously in a research mission during the year 1997, and two of NASA's most experienced astronauts.
During the mission spanning over a period of two weeks, the crew of Endeavor and that of the International Space Station will have the task of assembling a storage room for the Kibo laboratory and the installation of a robot arm with a mechanical hand onto the space station. The Japanese laboratory is designed to conduct experiments in zero gravity conditions and is constructed out of three separate modules, the part to be carried by Endeavor being the first of Kibo. A second flight will be conducted in May, while the final component of Kibo, that containing the experiments regarding exposure to space, will be delivered by the end of 2009.
The third part of the mission carried out by the crew of the space shuttle Endeavor will involve the testing of the repair of a heat shield, in anticipation for the maintenance service on the Hubble Space Telescope in the month of August or September. The testing of the repair of the heat shield is just on of the precautions NASA is taking in case the heat shield of the space shuttle fails, when the crew would remain stranded in space, far away for the relative safety of the International Space Station.
Wish they would have done the same for the crew of the Columbia space shuttle, which disintegrated in 2005 as it re-entered into Earth atmosphere, as a result of the damaging of a piece of insulating shield located on the left wing of the space shuttle. On top of the maintenance service on Hubble, NASA still has to carry out 11 more missions to finish the building of the International Space Station, of which 6 will take place this year.
Five more to go!