This will be the last time you will get to witness this phenomenon as it’s been reported that Atlantis will undock earlier than planned from the International Space Station tomorrow. This will earmark its return from its final mission into space ahead of the start of privatised space courier services, next year.

The astronauts aboard NASA’s final space shuttle flight are almost done packing up the large rubbish bin they took with them ahead of the journey home to Earth.

They spent most of yesterday, working overtime, packing everything that needs to come back to Earth into Raffaello, the Italian-made cargo canister that’s about the size of a bus.

Raffaello will be moved from the International Space Station back onto space shuttle Atlantis today and Atlantis will probably undock sometime tomorrow, ahead of final preparations for Thursday’s flight home to Florida.

With them they had ferried tons of supplies that are needed to fuel the International Space Station crew for the coming months.

The weather this evening is looking prime for viewing in both Cape Town and Johannesburg so make sure you’re outside at about 18h30 to have a look.

If you’re in Cape Town, you’ll need to start look in a northerly direction. The docked shuttle and space station will travel toward the east-south-east as it passes over.

If you’re in Jozi, you’ll need to start looking in an almost north-westerly direction and expect a flight path ending toward the south-south-east.

It should take about five minutes for the phenomenon to pass over our skies and it will be fairly bright so you won’t need anything fancy to see it.

NASA is retiring its three space shuttles and will be sending them to museums. It has future plans to work on sending astronauts beyond low-Earth orbit, or the current orbital realms of satellites and space stations.

[Thanks Graham]

[Source: MSNBC]