Space shuttle Endeavour has docked to the International Space Station and installed the AMS. Several tiles that seems to have been damaged is being inspected

This trip to ISS is space shuttle Endeavour's last journey in space. But AFP reports that several tiles that seem to be damaged are being inspected. "We don't have any reason for concern or alarm, We are very much in the middle of this process. I wanted to show you some areas we are working on," said Leroy Cain, deputy shuttle program manager.

Meanwhile the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer-2 (AMS) has been succesfully  installed on the International Space Station's right side. Mission Specialists Andrew Feustel and Roberto Vittori used the space shuttle’s robotic arm to extract it from Endeavour's payload bay. They handed it off to the space station’s Canadarm2, and Pilot Greg Johnson and Mission Specialist Greg Chamitoff then used the robotic arm to install AMS on the starboard side of the station’s truss.

The AMS team will monitor the experiment 24 hours a day, gathering data for as long as the space station is in orbit. Using a large magnet to create a magnetic field that will bend the path of the charged cosmic particles already traveling through space, eight different instruments will provide information on those particles as they make their way through the magnet.

Armed with that information, hundreds of scientists from 16 countries are hoping to determine what composes the universe and how it began, as the AMS searches for clues on the origin of dark matter and the existence of antimatter and other unusual matter. AMS also could provide information about pulsars, blazers, gamma ray bursts and any number of other cosmic phenomena.

Sources: NASA and AFP