365 days
> NASA enthuses that the spectrometer will run "24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and 365 days a year"
so that will be one day of downtime in the next 366 days then?
Space shuttle Endeavour this morning complete its leisurely 3.4-mile journey from Kennedy Space Center's Vehicle Assembly Building to Launch Pad 39A, ahead of its scheduled STS-134 mission launch on 19 April. The Endeavour crew. Pic: NASA NASA has provided the traditional cheery photo of the Endeavour crew, which shows …
Cmdr. Kelly is the husband of Gabrielle Giffords, the Arizona congresswoman who took a bullet through the brain fired by Jared Loughner in a failed assassination attempt that took 6 lives and injured another 13 on Jan. 8.
Giffords is making a remarkable recovery and is expected to be present for the launch of Endeavour.
Cool - support it with a carbon monofilament/Buckminsterfullerene strap, push ISS out to geostationary orbit using the ion drive and install the space elevator - no need for shuttles to resupply, which is a good job because that's a tad further than they could reach even if they weren't retiring.
Next: NASA to replace Space Shuttle with ACC's Space Elevator. Just have to wait until Kalidasa's Temple** is connected up by BT Infinity.**
** Timescale? Well, the Temple is in a very rural area, with not many people around to upvote the local exchange, and consequently the clue is in the product name...
...that started pretty long time ago, in the mid-90s. They had flown the first prototype AMS-01 onboard STS-91 (the very Discovery just retired two days ago) in 1998 if I remember the date correctly from my friend and fellow Hungarian, Sandor Blasko, who was a developer on the power supply side of things (control application, reporting software/client etc). Though I haven't heard of him for years now ("ping Sanyi -t") I'm following the news about AMS ever since he spent almost a year down in KSC in Florida in 1998 (I'm sure he's still working on this project); FWIW just found out his old photos are still online: http://mrc.mht.bme.hu/hg5crs/KSC/ and http://mrc.mht.bme.hu/hg5crs/JSC/
Beer because it's good times...