At 25 years of age, the veteran Atlantis will blast off from Launch Pad 39A on NASA’s 132nd space shuttle mission.

Space Shuttle Atlantis lifts off from Kennedy Space Center.

Star gazers and skywatchers will also have a chance to see Atlantis as it approaches the international space station and when it undocks. Anyone interested in checking it out should read ‘How to see shuttle Atlantis from Earth‘ on Space.com. Atlantis’s crew will perform three spacewalks on the 12-day mission and deliver Rassvet (Russian for dawn), the new research module and other spare parts.

Cool Atlantis Facts

1. Atlantis was named after the original exploration sailing vessel of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. It has lived up to its namesake venturing out into the unknown and returning with an abundance of scientific information.
2. It’s the shuttle fleet’s workhorse. The unsung hero Atlantis will have flown 32 missions to orbit and space stations. No stranger to space station missions, NASA’s oldest flying shuttle flew seven times to the Mir space station and 11 times to the International Space Station.
3. It was the first shuttle to launch an interplanetary probe. In 1989, Atlantis launched the Magellan spacecraft, which mapped more than 98 percent of Venus’s surface.
4. It helped us watch a comet hit a planet. In 1989, Atlantis launched the Galileo probe, which captured close-up images of an asteroid on its way to Jupiter. Then in 1994, it made the only direct observations of a comet collision when Shoemaker-Levy 9 slammed into the solar system’s biggest planet.
5. Atlantis doesn’t have an extension cord. Basically, it can’t plug into solar-powered electrical systems on the space station and is limited to 14-day missions, the maximum its hydrogen-oxygen fuel cells will allow.
6. It has a clone. The shuttle Endeavour was built from a complete set of spare parts that were originally made in case Atlantis was damaged. After the Challenger shuttle was lost, NASA decided to build another shuttle. (Endeavour’s last mission will be in November.)
7. Atlantis was the last space shuttle to visit the Hubble Space Telescope. During its May 2009 mission, the crew made five space walks to repair and enhance the Hubble with the Cosmic Origins spectrograph allowing the telescope to peer deeper into the universe’s ultraviolet light spectrum, as well as add Wide Field Camera 3 allowing astronomers better quality observations of galaxy evolution, dark matter and dark energy.
8. Atlantis is a movie star! That’s right, the shuttle co-stars in the movie “Hubble 3D” with narrator Leonardo DiCaprio about its 2009 mission to upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope.

Looking for more cool space shuttle stuff? Check out the NASA website, of course.

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