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Endeavor docked at the station

The space shuttle Endeavor docked for the last time at the International Space Station carrying six astronauts and the long-awaited Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer

The Space Shuttle Endeavor docked for the last time at the International Space Station carrying six astronauts and the long-awaited Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. It is a physical experiment that will track dark matter and antimatter particles.

Pictured: The space shuttle Endeavor and the European Space Agency's Columbus Laboratory are seen here after the shuttle docked at the space station on May 18, 2011. Photo: NASA

The docking took place at 10:14 GMT (13:14 Israel time) and the opening of the gates between the two spacecraft took place at 11:38 GMT (14:38 Israel time), about an hour earlier than planned.
Endeavor performed an inversion so that the space station crew could take high-resolution images of the shuttle's heat shield. Commander Mark Kelly turned the Endeavor 360 degrees backwards.

Now there are 12 people staying at the station, including the two crews, but on May 23, three of the station crew members, Dimitri Kondratiev, Cady Coleman and Paolo Nespoli, will leave the station in the Soyuz spaceship they came with to the station and return to Earth.
Unlike most shuttle missions to the space station, the two crews will work in shifts and not on the same schedule. This is due to the delay between the two weeks of the Endeavor mission. which caused the mission to coincide with the departure of the old crew members from the space station. The three will be required to adjust their sleeping times with the landing day schedule.
The shuttle is scheduled to leave the station on May 30 and is currently scheduled to land on June 1.
The STS-134 mission will include four spacewalks, in part to install the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a $2 billion, 7,000-kilogram particle detector that should operate for about a decade and provide new details about the origin of the universe.
The mission commander is Mark Kelly, the husband of Congresswoman Gabriela Giffords who is recovering after being shot in the head in January. Giffords will undergo surgery today to reconstruct her skull at a Houston hospital.