This last mission for the shuttle includes Commander Mark Kelly, pilot Greg H. Johnson, mission specialists Greg Chamitoff, Andrew Feustel, Mike Fincke, as well as Roberto Vittori from the European Space Agency.

The launch is intended for 8:56am, with the countdown clock having started this morning at 7am.

The initial launch date for Endeavour was April 29, but it was cancelled at the last minute due to a failure with a heating device.

Kelly said “It’s great to be back,” and that “We really appreciate all the hard work by the team that’s worked over the last couple of weeks to get shuttle Endeavour ready”.

Johnson and Kelley have been practicing landings in training aircraft that have been altered to handle like the space shuttles.

If technical issues and weather play along, then the launch on Monday will be the 25th, as well as being the last mission for Endeavour, which is the youngest among all of the NASA orbiter shuttles.

This potential new insect repellant class was found within the laboratory of professor Laurence Zwiebel of Vanderbilt Biological Sciences. The findings were reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences online Early Edition.

David Rinker, a graduate student who collaborated with Gregory Pask, another graduate student, and Patrick Jones, a post-doctoral fellow, said that “It wasn’t something we set out to find,” but that “It was an anomaly that we noticed in our tests”.

The tests were initially intended to develop a new way to assist in controlling malaria’s spread by interrupting the ability of the mosquito – the insect through which the disease is spread – to smell. The research was funded through a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grant, as well as from support from the Grand Challenges in Global Health Initiative.

The University of Delaware is a member of a consortium of 98 universities capable of granting Ph.Ds, called the Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU), which has chosen Rosenthal as one of thirty recipients of the Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award which will allow him to follow in this energy research.

This award is highly competitive and rewards the recipient with $5,000 from ORAU, as well as $5,000 from the university of the recipient, in order to be used as seed money for research.  It is designed to promote and improve research and educational growth among new members of the faculty, while opening the door to additional opportunities for funding.

Rosenthal described his research by explaining that “The catalytic reduction of carbon dioxide to carbon monoxide is an important transformation that would allow for the mitigation of atmospheric CO2 levels, while producing an energy-rich substrate that forms a basis for fuels production”.

NASA will be holding a press conference tomorrow to provide a more detailed update regarding the repairs status for the hydraulic systems on Endeavour.  They stated that “Kennedy [Space Center] technicians are continuing work to resolve an issue in a heater circuit associated with Endeavour’s hydraulic system that resulted in the [April 29] launch postponement”. 

They explained the location of the issue within an aft load control assembly, where a switchbox and possibly some wiring require replacement. That said, NASA confirms that it has not yet managed to discover the actual reason that the switchbox failed, but stated that its technicians are replacing any parts that may have been behind it.

Among them, the principal investigator from Stanford University in California, Francis Everitt, told the press that “We’ve completed this landmark experiment testing Einstein’s universe, and Einstein survives”.

The Gravity Probe B was launched in 2004, and the mission used four gyroscopes (orientation measuring devices) that are capable of providing exceptional precision.  These gyroscopes were installed into a satellite that was designed to examine two predictions regarding gravity from the theory of relativity.

These two predictions were the geodetic effect (the altering of space and time around a gravitational body such as a star or a planet) and frame dragging (the ability of a rotating object to draw the fabric and space and time along with it).

Everitt gave the example “Imagine the Earth is immersed in honey, and you can imagine the honey would be dragged around and [an object in the honey] would also be dragged around,” this was what was measured using the satellite’s gyroscopes.

This increase in water levels is well above the estimates that have been performed in the past and poses severe threats to many locations from Florida to Bangladesh, Shanghai to London, and all of the Pacific islands that are low-lying. It would also mean that structures such as tsunami barriers in Japan will need to be significantly larger and therefore more expensive to construct and maintain.

The report, submitted by the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP) in Oslo, which is supported by the Arctic Council of eight countries, said that “The past six years (until 2010) have been the warmest period ever recorded in the Arctic”.  It explained that “In the future, global sea level is projected to rise by 0.9 meters (2ft 11in) to 1.6 meters (5ft 3in) by 2100 and the loss of ice from Arctic glaciers, ice caps and the Greenland ice sheet will make a substantial contribution,” when compared to the levels projected from 1990.

The original launch date for Endeavour also revealed to NASA that the auxiliary power unit on the space shuttle had also failed.  Though the space agency rapidly aborted the launch upon the discovery of these technical problems, it was so close to the planned liftoff time that the astronauts had already prepared and were on their way to boarding. 

Mike Moses, Space Shuttle Program launch integration manager, released a statement that explained the nature of the problems, saying “That basically means the power is not getting out to the heaters that weren’t working on launch day”.

NASA is now removing and replacing the malfunctioning parts, but this does take time to accomplish.  Furthermore, once it has been put in place, it must be carefully tested to ensure that it is functioning properly – a process that takes a minimum of two days.

The first type of memory is the ability to recognize something that you have already seen.  For example, looking at a photograph of a toy you loved as a child, and knowing it on sight.  The second type of memory is being able to describe how that recalled object looked, either verbally or with a drawing.

The scientists determined that the monkeys had the ability to remember basic shapes with some versatility, as they were capable of reproducing them on a touch screen computer.  These findings are important because they demonstrate that the memory of a monkey is much closer to that of humans than had formerly been believed.

Benjamin Basile of Emory University said that “It’s exciting to speculate that they may be able to recollect the appearance of monkeys they know, what favorite foods look like, or the path they would have to take to get to a water source.”

According to Mike Leinbach, the shuttle launch director, there was also a second heater that had been “exhibiting some funny behavior”.  Leinbach stated that it is believed that one of the issues with the heaters may be a short circuit within the switch box of the device.  NASA will be having a look at this equipment as early as Friday night in order to make the necessary changes to it.

NASA estimates that the Endeavour launch should be able to be rescheduled for Monday, May 2, 2011, if all goes well.

When the announcement was made, the shuttle’s crew had already been on their way to the launch pad.  This was the penultimate liftoff for the NASA shuttle program, which had drawn a significant amount of attention due to the anticipated attendance of President Barack Obama and his family, as well as Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who is still in recovery after having been shot in an assassination attempt.  Mark Kelly, the commander of Endeavour, is the husband of Ms. Giffords.

The telescope’s shuttering was first announced on Friday, April 22, by SETI scientists who said that they were no longer able to obtain the $5 million required for its operation over the upcoming two years.  Franck Marchis, from both SETI and the University of California at Berkeley – which supervises the telescope’s daily operations – stated that the Hat Creek Observatory activities have already been brought to a halt.

Marchis released a statement that said “All the equipments have been taken care of to make sure that they do not deteriorate over time,” and that “Unfortunately, three members of the Hat Creek Observatory staff have received a lay-off notice and one of them is moving to the CARMA observatory, a millimeter wave interferometer”.

This end comes as a result of the extreme budget shortfalls from the Californian and U.S. governments.  While science funding has essentially dried up in every area, it is especially hard for SETI to obtain money as its projects don’t offer any predictable or immediate returns.