Latest on the Endeavour Mission: STS-134

AMS in the cargo bay  - Image credit : NASA

The crew of space shuttle Endeavour woke today to “Luna” by Jose Serrano was played for Mission Specialist Greg Chamitoff. (Jose is a personal friend and wrote the song especially for this mission).

First Mission STS-134 spacewalk

The crew will also begin preparation for the mission's first spacewalk.  Drew Feustel and Greg Chamitoff will have to get used to reduced air pressure to purge nitrogen from their bloodstreams and prevent the risk of the “bends”.

Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer-2 (AMS)

The main focus if the mission was achieved at 5:46 a.m. EDT, when the $2 billion Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer-2 (AMS) was installed successfully on the outside of the International Space Station's right side. Mission Specialists Andrew Feustel and Roberto Vittori used the space shuttle’s robotic arm to extract it from Endeavour's payload bay. They handed it off to the space station’s Pilot Greg Johnson and Mission Specialist Greg Chamitoff then used the robotic arm to install AMS on the starboard side of the space station.

The AMS is a two ton ring of powerful magnets and detectors to track cosmic rays in a search for various types of unusual matter. The AMS will be operated remotely from Earth, automatically sending information to scientists for the life of the station.T

The AMS team will monitor the experiment 24 hours a day, gathering data and using a large magnet to create a magnetic field to bend the path of the charged particles traveling through space.

Hundreds of scientists from sixteen countries are working together on the project to determine what composes the universe and how it began, so the AMS could provide information about pulsars, blazers and gamma ray bursts that help us understand the cosmos.

Moon-Luna Llena Music Video