“Atlantis, Houston, go at throttle-up”

Hello! If you are new here, you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed for updates on this topic.

Cape Canaveral.
Launchpad 39a.
Novermber 16th, 2009.
2:28 p.m. EST.

A swarm of heat surged from the boosters of 24-year-old space shuttle Atlantis as she beautifully abandonned us yet another time to explore outer space.
A crew of 6 men and women will spend 11 days in orbit. The mission’s main goal is to bring many spare parts to the ISS (International Space Station). When the space shuttles retire in 2010 and before NASA’s new fleet of Orion capsules are ready in 2014, the station will only be accessible by the Russian soyuz spacecraft. Since the space shuttle is the only manned spacecraft capable of transporting payloads of large sizes and in large amounts, long term provisions are being made. These include doubled spare gyroscopes, tank assemblies and pump modules.
Around 9 metric tons (nearly 20,000 pounds) of this payload are contained in two separate ExPRESS logistic carriers. They will be attached to the station by an “Intergrated Truss Structure” installed in June 2007 by the STS-117 crew. That mission was also faithfully served by shuttle Atlantis.
Three 6-hour spacewalks will take place on day 4, day 6 and day 8. Mission specialists Michael Forman, Robert Satcher and Randolf Bresnik will each participate in two space walks, notably to install the GATOR (Grappling Adaptor to On-Orbit Railing) bracket to Columbus, the European laboratory.
Three official* scientific experiments are scheduled. One aims to understand how microbes grow in a weightless environment. Furthermore, a relatively large amount of Painted Lady Butterfly and Monarch Butterfly larvae have been sent. On earth, hundreds of elementary and middle schools will be comparing their own butterflies to those sent in space. The third experiment will study gravity’s roll ingrowth of reaction wood (wood that grows under mechanical stress).
STS-129 is also the last space shuttle mission with crew rotation. Atlantis will pick up astronaut Nicole Stott from Expedition 21 on the way back. This time, no one is replacing her for an extended stay on the ISS.

*Other experiments are often conducted by astronauts during their free time.

Enjoy this high-def video courtesy of Spacevidcast and NASA. Don’t miss the end sequence, when the main engine is cutoff and when the external tank is jettisoned, it’s quite a spectacular view.