Last Mission of Endeavour

Space Shuttle Endeavour will have it's final mission this week from the launch pad of the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The crew of this mission are: Mission Specialists Mike Fincke, Greg Chamitoff and Andrew Feustel, commander Mark Kelly, pilot Greg H. Johnson, and European Space Agency astronaut Roberto Vittori. The Endeavours mission is to install the cosmic particle detector on to the International Space Station.

Endeavours first mission was on May 7, 1992 called Maiden Flight: to capture and redeploy Intel Sat VI and that was 2 decades ago. Endeavours current mission is significant because it will be its last mission and will soon retire at the California Science Center in LA. Endeavour travelled 103.1 million miles; orbits 4,429 in total and the name Endeavour was inspired by the two ships of exploration by James Cook. It's total time in space is 280 days with 24 total flights and with 148 total crew members for 20 years. Installing the Magnetic Spectrometer will help study the Universe and its origin by searching for dark matters. It is designed to operate as an external experiment on the International Space Station. Supposedly, April 29, 2011 is the launch schedule but, due to technical problems on the heaters auxiliary power unit, NASA announced a 48 hr delay of the launch. The expected crowd in Cape Canaveral is 750K thus, Florida is beaming with the positive luck right now. Business in the Sunshine state is pretty awesome.