Fri, 31 Jul 2009 09:48:51 AM CDT

Space shuttle Endeavour touched down at 10:48: a.m. EDT. at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Commander Mark Polansky is expected to make a brief statement on the runway after the post-landing walk-around of the shuttle. The post-landing news conference is set for approximately 1 p.m. and will air live on NASA Television. The crew's news conference is set to begin at about 3:15 p.m. The astronauts return to Houston's Ellington Field is tentatively set for about 5 p.m. Saturday.

STS-127 was the 127th space shuttle mission, the 23rd flight for Endeavour and the 29th shuttle visit to the station.

Twin satellite deployments and a check of the systems that will control Endeavour's return home to the Kennedy Space Center, Florida, are on tap today as the shuttle leads the International Space Station in orbit.

Early in the day, STS-127 Commander Mark Polansky and Pilot Doug Hurley will test the thruster jets and aerodynamic control surfaces that will be used to guide Endeavour to a landing planned for 10:48 a.m. EDT Friday.

Once those checks are complete, the crew will deploy two pairs of small satellites.

The first, called Dual RF Astrodynamic GPS Orbital Navigator Satellite (DRAGONSat), will look at independent rendezvous of spacecraft in orbit using Global Positioning Satellite data. The second, called Atmospheric Neutral Density Experiment-2 (ANDE-2), will measure the density and composition of the rarified atmosphere 200 miles above the Earth's surface.

A new ISS Progress 34 (P34) cargo craft docked to the aft port of the Zvezda service module Wednesday at 7:12 a.m. EDT carrying 2 ½ tons of food, fuel and supplies for the station crew.

› View docking video at http://anon.nasa-global.edgesuite.net/wm.nasa-global/expedition20/p34_do...

The day before at 1:26 p.m. space shuttle Endeavour undocked from the station completing 11 days of cargo transfers and the construction of Japan's Kibo laboratory.

› Read the latest STS-127 news at http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/index.html

The P34 originally launched July 24 from Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan beginning a five-day chase to the station while the STS-127 and Expedition 20 crews conducted joint operations.

[img]http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/160328main_undock.jpg[/img] Image above: The shadow of space shuttle Endeavour can be seen on the International Space Station's solar arrays shortly after undocking. Photo credit: NASA TV The crews of Endeavour and the International Space Station parted company today at 1:26 p.m EDT, with all of the docked mission's objectives complete. The Expedition 20 crew on the station lost one crew member and gained another. Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency Astronaut Koichi Wakata will be returning home on Endeavour after four months as a member of the Expedition 18, 19 and 20 crews. The station's newest NASA flight engineer, Tim Kopra, arrived aboard Endeavour.

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 04:02:20 AM CDT

The shuttle crew was awakened at 3:03 a.m. EDT to the strains of "Proud to Be an American" performed by Lee Greenwood. The song was selected for spacewalker Chris Cassidy, a former Navy SEAL, who now has 18 hours, five minutes of extravehicular activity to his credit over three spacewalks.

Commander Mark Polansky and his team will begin checking out the laser rangefinders and other equipment that will be used to provide precise readings on the distance between the two spacecraft.

The station will be reoriented for undocking by 12:38 p.m., and docking latches will open at 1:26 p.m.

NASA astronaut Pam Melroy is leaving the agency to take a job in the private sector. Melroy, a retired Air Force colonel, is a veteran of three space shuttle flights and the second woman to command one.

"Pam has performed superbly as an astronaut," said Steve Lindsey, chief of the Astronaut Office at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. "She has flown three highly successful space shuttle missions and contributed in several other technical areas during her 14 years of service with the Astronaut Office. Her leadership as the commander of the STS-120 space shuttle mission paved the way to six-person crew operations on the International Space Station."

The University of Texas at Austin announced this week they will deploy a satellite in space on July 30, 2009 at 7:27 AM CDT via the STS-127 Space Shuttle Picosatellite Launcher (SSPL).

BEVO1 is a 12.5 cm cube and 3 kg in mass. The purpose of the mission is to collect data from NASA's DRAGON GPS receiver.

BEVO1 has two modes, data and beacon. The data mode is on over most parts of the United States, and the rest of the time, the satellite is in beacon mode. Also, anyone tracking BEVO1 can record what they hear at http://paradigm.ae.utexas.edu/ops. The University of Texas also has additional information at: http://www.utexas.edu/news/2009/06/09/picosatellite/

The International Space Station may feel a bit crowded with 13 people aboard, but the population boost has also given it a multicultural flair, an astronaut said Sunday.

NASA astronaut Dave Wolf, who once lived aboard Russia's Mir space station for months, said the space station is an inviting place.

"As you go through here, you hear different languages. You hear different music," Wolf told reporters in a televised news conference. "It's like going around the world within a spacecraft that's already going around."

The space station is currently home to its first full six-man crew and seven astronauts from the shuttle Endeavour, which brought Wolf and his crewmates to the station. That makes 13 in all - the largest single gathering aboard the station.

NASA engineers have revived a vital air-scrubbing system on the International Space Station and are hunting for the source of the glitch that sent it offline.

The American-built air scrubber, called a Carbon Dioxide Removal Assembly (CDRA), shut down Saturday, sending engineers on Earth scrambling for a fix while a record 13 people work aboard the space station.

They ultimately revived the life support gear in a manual mode, one that requires extra flight controllers on Earth to keep it working. Normally, the system runs automatically and NASA is hopeful that a software patch expected late Sunday will recover that ability as well.

The Apollo 11 astronauts returned from the moon 40 years ago today, but they left behind more than footprints. An experiment they placed on the moon's surface is still running to this day.
The Lunar Laser Ranging Experiment is the only moon investigation to continuously operate since the Apollo 11 mission. The experiment studies the Earth-Moon system and beams the data to labs around the world, including NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif.
"Yes, we are still going," said James Williams, a JPL scientist involved with the experiment, in an e-mail interview.
Data from the ranging experiment has been used to learn â€" among other things â€" that the moon has a fluid core and is moving away from the Earth, and that Einstein's Theory of Relativity is accurate.