Astronauts aboard the shuttle Endeavour on a marathon astronomy mission said Friday that the fragile blue planet circling beneath them is more awe-inspiring than the mysteries of the stars and galaxies.
"The deep questions we have, I think, are really enforced by being up in space and looking back at the Earth and seeing how beautiful and fragile it is," said Sam Durrance, an astronomer from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore."I wish I could find the appropriate words to describe just how beautiful the Earth is at sunrise," flight engineer Wendy Lawrence added in a brief radio interview.
"It's like nothing I've ever seen from down on Earth," said Lawrence, a former carrier-based Navy helicopter pilot. "I've seen some beautiful sunsets on the Pacific Ocean. But nothing beats what it's like up here in space, absolutely fantastic."
Meanwhile, the seven astronauts trained their $200 million observatory toward a range of celestial targets, including aging, closely grouped stars called globular clusters.
Astronomers hope to improve their ability to calculate the ages of the most mature stars. Once accepted estimates of 12 billion to 15 billion years now appear to conflict with calculations made last year using the Hubble Space Telescope, suggesting the universe is younger than previously thought, about 8 billion to 12 billion years.