The Space Shuttle mission STS-130 ended last night with the Orbiter Endeavour safely landing in Florida at 10:20 p.m. Eastern time yesterday. I live-tweeted the event, and so I was too busy to pay much attention to the Twitter feed from Soichi Noguchi, an astronaut onboard the International Space Station. I wish I had, because then I could've retweeted a picture he took that is simply amazing:
That's Endeavour as it was over (I believe) the Caribbean Sea. At that point, it was still sloughing off the energy of orbit, dropping in velocity as it dropped through our atmosphere. To do that, it made two wide, curving, banking turns, called S-turns, that slow the Orbiter down. As it's doing that, it's ramming the Earth's air at something like Mach 25, which violently compresses the gas and heats it up. This is what causes the Orbiter (as well as incoming meteors) ...
