Nasa Shuttle Launch

NASA abruptly cancels shuttle launch; Monday liftoff planned

CAPE CANAVERAL — NASA abruptly canceled the launch of space shuttle Endeavour on Friday, ruining what was to be a historic day brimming with the emotion of gravely wounded Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords seeing her husband command the shuttle program's next-to-last flight into space.

A faulty thermostat on an auxiliary power unit delayed the launch for at least 72 hours as engineers worked to pinpoint and fix the problem. Launch director Mike Leinbach said the earliest the shuttle could launch would be 2:33 p.m. Monday.

Friday's scrubbing came dramatically close to liftoff on what appeared to be a near-flawless launch day: With a helicopter overhead and a SWAT vehicle in chase, the space shuttle crew had left NASA's operations center in an airstream trailer for the 10-minute trip to the launch pad when word came: Launch of Endeavour is scrubbed.

The shuttle had been scheduled to launch at 3:47 p.m.

President Obama and his family, traveling from the storm devastation in Alabama to Florida for the launch, touched down at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, less than an hour later.

Obama and his family toured the Orbiter Processing Facility and had a close-up look at the shuttle Atlantis. The Atlantis will launch on the final mission of the space shuttle program on June 28.

Giffords, who is recovering from a gunshot wound to the head, has been in Cape Canaveral since Wednesday to be at the launch of the shuttle, which her husband, astronaut Matt Kelly, is to command.

Giffords hasn't been seen publicly since the Jan. 8 assassination attempt, and left her Houston rehabilitation hospital for the first time to travel to Florida. It's unclear whether she will stay for the attempted launch on Monday or return to Houston.

She had been expected to watch the liftoff in private, as were the other astronaut families.

The Endeavour astronauts, in an Airstream trailer dubbed the Astrovan, were seconds from the Endeavour and less then three hours before a planned liftoff to a 14-day mission to the International Space Station, when Friday's launch was called off. The Astrovan abruptly turned around, making for at least 72 hours of hurry-up-and-wait for the crew.

"You're bored, you're anxious, you've done all your training and you're ready to go," says astronaut Rick Mastracchio of the lead-up to the launch. "It's a slow time."



A misfiring thermostat, one of two used to keep a fuel line from freezing, is the culprit, Leinbach says. The auxiliary power units are fueled with hydrazine.

"It was a hard failure. We couldn't get it to come to life no matter what we did," Leinbach said.

Another heater farther up the line "was also exhibiting funny behavior," he said.

Engineers suspect a short in an electrical box.

"We didn't want to commit to flight with only one heater," which would leave the shuttle at risk for a frozen fuel line if the other thermostat failed, Leinbach said.

Fixing the problem and ramping up again for the launch will take a minimum of three days, Leinbach said.

Mission directors decided at 12:16 p.m. to cancel the launch. The astronauts, fully dressed in their orange flight suits and minutes away from boarding the shuttle, had left their operations center just 11 minutes earlier.

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/2011-04-29-nasa-endeavour-shuttle-launch-postponed_n.htm?csp=34news


Space Shuttle Launch to Put Giant Ray Detector in Space

If you can't make antimatter, just make it come to you.

That's the logic behind NASA's Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a U.S. $1.5-billion, seven-ton cosmic ray detector that will soon blast off to the International Space Station with the space shuttle launch of Endeavour.

Though originally slated to launch Friday, the space shuttle encountered a problem with its power unit that will keep it grounded until Monday.

Designed by particle physicists at the European Center for Nuclear Reserch (CERN), the AMS studies the same types of particles that atom smashers such as the Large Hadron Collider are meant to produce.

But instead of producing antimatter particles, the AMS seeks out the particles in their natural environment—in space. (Explore an interactive of the Higgs-Boson, or the God particle.)

The AMS, to be installed on the space station's starboard truss, will study high-energy particles that fly through space at nearly the speed of light—collecting seven gigabits of data per second.

The device could be operational within a few days of the space shuttle launch, according to NASA AMS project manager Trent Martin.

After Space Shuttle Launch, New Discoveries?

The spectrometer is designed to look for evidence of antimatter and dark matter. But if AMS turns up something completely unexpected, scientists will still be happy.

"The hope is to find out something new. Something really unexpected, because it calls for a redefinition of your ideas and the basics of physics," said Roberto Battiston, a physicist at Italy's University of Perugia and deputy spokesperson for the AMS.

"This is the same story since Galileo, when he looked at the sky and was not expecting Jupiter's satellites." (See "Galileo's Telescope at 400: Facts, Myths, More.")

Even if AMS fails to detect antimatter or evidence of dark matter, the detector will serve one important function: measuring the strength of space's cosmic rays.

Most cosmic ray measurements have been done with short experiments. Having a long-term yardstick will be crucial for planning future manned missions to Mars or beyond, experts say.

Spectrometer to Run Indefinitely

AMS was originally scheduled to launch in 2005, but after the 2003 Columbia space shuttle disaster, NASA drastically cut nonessential space shuttle missions like the one that would have carried the AMS.

Then, after finally earning a spot for the AMS on a July 2010 space shuttle launch, principal investigator Sam Ting decided to replace the device's electromagnet.

The cryogenic superconducting magnet had enough coolant to last for three years, said Ting, AMS spokesperson and physicist at MIT and CERN.

"After three years, we could have refueled the helium, but then they decided not to fly the shuttle anymore," he said.

The space station itself is expected to run until 2020 or even 2028. With its new, weaker magnet, which doesn't require coolant, the AMS is expected to run indefinitely—or until the space station itself comes down.

It took just a few months to replace the magnet, but the decision was "agonizing," since it would mean postponing the AMS's launch, according to the University of Perugia's Battiston.

In retrospect, he said, "it was a very wise choice."

Superconducting Magnet Drawback

The one drawback to removing the supermagnet? NASA had thought that superconducting magnets, in addition to helping measure space radiation, could help shield astronauts from it.

"There is potential in the future that you could use superconducting magnets to block high-energy radiation that would hurt astronauts," NASA's Martin said.

"As the NASA project manager, I was a little disappointed in the fact that we wouldn't be able to operate a working superconducting magnet in space," he said.

But, Martin added, the team did gather ground-based data that would be helpful for future missions—and the intact magnet sits at CERN.

While data will be beamed down from AMS the minute it's turned on, principal investigator Ting expects data analysis will take a long time.

"We're going to publish very slowly, very carefully," he said.

He's not afraid of being scooped: AMS took 17 years of planning and $1.5 billion.

"For the next 30 years, I doubt anybody will put a magnetic spectrometer into space. I don't think anybody else will be foolish enough to repeat it."

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/04/110429-shuttle-launch-endeavour-ams-space-science-nation/

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