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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – Endeavour and its sextet astronauts showed up at the International Space Station on Wednesday with the most pricey payload ever carried by a shuttle, a $2 billion magnetic figure that scientists wish module unsnarl the mysteries of the cosmos.

The digit orbiting crews module attach the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer to the expanse send Thursday.

Endeavour — making its test travelling and the next-to-last grace of NASA's shuttle epoch — cropped with the expanse send as the digit vessels soared more than 200 miles above the planet, nearby Chile.

Commander Mark Kelly steered Endeavour in for the slightly primeval linkup. He is mated to scraped Arizona legislator Gabrielle Giffords, who attended the shuttle move Monday. Giffords was shot in the head Jan. 8 during an defamation endeavor that also killed sextet people and scraped 12 others at a semipolitical event in Tucson, Ariz.

The expanse send gathering rang the ship's bell to mark Endeavour's arrival. It is the 12th and test meet by Endeavour to the expanse station; after this mission, the baby of NASA's shuttle fast module be decommissioned and sent to a museum in Los Angeles.

Atlantis module circularize out the test shuttle activate in July.

Kelly and his gathering module pay nearly digit weeks at the expanse station. Their main employ is to establish the 7-ton Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, an planetary collaboration representing 16 countries and led by Nobel-winning physicist prophet Ting of the Colony Institute of Technology.

At the heart of the spectrometer is a 3-foot, doughnut-shaped magnet. The instrument module seek out invisible dark matter as substantially as antimatter; whether some of this is found or not, the results module support explain what the universe is prefabricated of and how it formed.

As presently as the spectrometer is installed, it immediately should begin collecting data. Ting expects to move receiving data within an distance or two.

The AMS module remain anchored to the expanse send for the rest of its life. The outpost module move to control until at least 2020.

Endeavour's gathering also module unload constituent parts for the expanse send and circularize out four spacewalks, the first one scheduled for Friday.

For now, 12 astronauts are aboard the shuttle-station complex. On Monday, three of the sextet expanse send residents module rise into their Russian Soyuz capsulise and convey to Earth after a five-month stay. Endeavour's two-week move retard resulted in the assignment interruption.

NASA module move to rely on Russia to instrumentation U.S. astronauts backwards and forward to the expanse send for the foreseeable future. The expanse authority wants clannish companies in USA to verify over this operation, hopefully within a some years.

The Obama administration wants NASA centering on interplanetary travel, erst the shuttles are retired.

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Online:

NASA: http://www.nasa.gov/shuttle

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