NASA's Space Shuttle Endeavour Streaks Through NW Sky (VIDEO)

Video of the Space Shuttle Endeavor passover from Salem, Oregon.

All images courtesy: NASA Video by Tim King

(CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. NASA) - The Space shuttle Endeavour made an interesting site passing about over Oregon tonight. Soaring 220 miles above the earth, cooking along at an incredible 17,500 mph, the shuttle and space station passed from NW to SE around 9:06 p.m. Saturday.

Reports told us to keep our eyes open for a bright, fast moving dot. Sure enough, right on cue, this amazing piece of technology with 13 human beings aboard, zoomed above the atmosphere and flashed by at a tremendous amount of speed. I'd say the force was with them.

That is no small matter, in fact this crowd of 13 astronauts made history on this flight by comprising the largest number of people in space at one time. It comes forty years after the infamous Apollo 11 moon landing.

The Endeavour's schedule has it returning to earth on July 31st 2009. Especially in space terms, that sounds like a short hop.

Endeavour will be on a different trajectory Sunday night around 9:29 p.m. when it will come out of the north-northwest at 9:26 p.m., near the constellation Leo.

It is reported that the space shuttle will traverses the southwestern sky near the thin young moon before heading south. This should last until around 9:31 p.m.

NASA reports that, "Her crew of seven launched at 6:03 p.m. EDT Wednesday from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The mission will deliver the final segment to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Kibo laboratory and a new crew member to the International Space Station."

Endeavour's 16-day mission has many interesting things in store for its astronauts, including five spacewalks, and the important job of installing a pair of platforms outside of the Japanese module. One of those platforms will be permanently fixed, while the other will allow experiments to be directly exposed to space.

NASA says the experiment storage pallet that will be detached and returned with the shuttle. During the mission, Kibo's robotic arm will transfer three experiments from the pallet to the exposed platform.

"Future experiments also can be moved to the platform from the inside of the station using the laboratory's airlock."

Shortly before liftoff, Commander Mark Polansky thanked the teams that helped make the launch possible.

"Endeavour has patiently waited for this," said Polansky. "We're ready to go, and we're going to take all of you with us on a great mission."

Polansky is joined on STS-127 by Pilot Doug Hurley and Mission Specialists Christopher Cassidy, Tom Marshburn, Dave Wolf, Canadian Space Agency astronaut Julie Payette and Tim Kopra.

Kopra replaces space station crew member Koichi Wakata, who has been aboard the station for more than three months.

Kopra will return to Earth during the next station shuttle mission, STS-128, targeted to launch in August 2009. Hurley, Cassidy Marshburn and Kopra are all flying in space for the first time.

The shuttle's first landing opportunity at Kennedy is scheduled for Friday, July 31 at 10:45 a.m. STS-127 is the 127th space shuttle flight, the 29th to the station, the 23rd for Endeavour and the third in 2009.

The video below was recorded from Salem, Oregon and is edited, but not modified in terms of speed. Some of the video is digitally zoomed and some involves foreground for perspective. The NW to SE passing happened very quickly, and was recorded on my Panasonic AJ-D200 video camera with a 14x1 lens.

There are more images below the video:

Video

This is an interesting link, Shuttle Commander Mark Polansky is sending updates about the mission to his Twitter account, Astro_127. He can be followed at: http://twitter.com/Astro_127

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Tim King is a former U.S. Marine with twenty years of experience on the west coast as a television news producer, photojournalist, reporter and assignment editor. In addition to his role as a war correspondent, this Los Angeles native serves as Salem-News.com's Executive News Editor.
Tim spent the winter of 2006/07 covering the war in Afghanistan, and he was in Iraq over the summer of 2008, reporting from the war while embedded with both the U.S. Army and the Marines. Tim holds numerous awards for reporting, photography, writing and editing, including the Oregon AP Award for Spot News Photographer of the Year (2004), the first place Electronic Media Award in Spot News, Las Vegas, (1998), Oregon AP Cooperation Award (1991); and several other awards including the 2005 Red Cross Good Neighborhood Award for reporting. Serving the community in very real terms, Salem-News.com is the nation's only truly independent high traffic news Website, affiliated with Google News and several other major search engines and news aggregators.
You can send Tim an email at this address: newsroom@salem-news.com