Atlantis Preparing for December 6
We have had three outstanding flights this year and we are looking forward to a fourth,” space shuttle program manager Wayne Hale said Friday after the Flight Readiness Review concluded.
The green light has been okayed by NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida for the Atlantis Space Shuttle—December 6th on Thursday, at 4:31 p.m. Their last stages of preparations have been cleared, and the seven astronauts are looking forward to the poker game the night before launching as part of their rituals.
Now that the Harmony node is fully operable on the International Space Station, new attention is being propelled toward a European laboratory, built to expand the research capabilities of the ISS. Earlier, the space agency had decided to back out of the plans for this European laboratory. Little is known about NASA’s plans to send up something entirely different—a $1.5 billion device that would produce even more significant knowledge.
The new instrument, as compared to the European-built laboratory presently being sent up, was designed to detect and measure cosmic rays differently. It took approximately 500 global physicists to design and build it, but many were afraid it would remain on Earth because of the short supply of room on the remaining shuttle missions to the ISS.
Because of this, the one billion dollar Columbus laboratory, considered to be the kind of scientific workspace always backed by the station, is going up but not without misgivings. According to Martin Zell, head of the research operations for the ESA and involved with the European space laboratory, “…if the other device does not make it to the station, it will be a very great setback for the space community and the ISS.”
The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), or the cosmic ray detector, was designed to look for evidence of how the universe was formed, as compared to the Columbus laboratory which will allow the NASA scientists to conduct “long-term biological, fluid and materials science research in weightless conditions”. AMS is important because it searches for the dark matter and antimatter—both their existence and workings—as it exists in theory only, never being identified or measured.
Something new and innovative, the Department of Energy concluded in its scientific review that this new AMS could possibly require fundamental discoveries to make it work. “The credibility of the United States is at stake here, because NASA made a commitment to bring Columbus and AMS to the space station,” said Samuel C.C. Ting, a Nobel laureate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who conceived the project in 1994 and drew in collaborators from 60 institutes in 16 nations to build and fund it. “After all this work, it would be a terrible blow if the instrument cannot be used.” And because this is not occurring, many fear the AMS will becoming nothing but an expensive museum piece.
This entry was posted on Monday, November 26th, 2007 at 5:37 pm and is filed under Space Agency News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
