Space Shuttle Endeavour Touches Down For Final Time

The space shuttle Endeavour has landed -- for one last time.

After a 19-year career and 299 days spent in space, the youngest NASA shuttle Endeavour touched down for the last time at approximately 2:36 am Eastern. It landed at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The shuttle is on its last mission to space after nearly 20 years in service. It's the second to last mission for NASA's space shuttle program. NASA crews are preparing to launch the Atlantis space shuttle on July 8.

Endeavour delivered a $2 billion cosmic ray detector, called Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer-2 (AMS), which will remain mounted on the space station for the next decade.

The mission was approximately 16 days long. The crew members for space shuttle Endeavour's STS-134 mission are Commander Mark Kelly, Pilot Gregory H. Johnson and Mission Specialists Michael Fincke, Greg Chamitoff, Andrew Feustel and European Space Agency astronaut Roberto Vittori.

The flight is Endeavour's 25th since a maiden voyage in 1992. The youngest shuttle orbiter was built as a replacement for Challenger, the shuttle destroyed in a 1986 launch accident that killed seven astronauts. Endeavour has traveled more than 122 million miles over the course of 25 missions.

Endeavour undocked from the International Space Station at nearly midnight on Monday evening, circling around the station several hundred feet away from it as the crew to still and video images.

The Endeavour is the second of the last three shuttle craft to finish up, the Atlantis will follow suit this year. NASA's oldest and most travelled spacecraft Discovery made its final voyage into space in February.

The shuttles are being retired as NASA is winding down its space shuttle operations this summer due to high operating costs and to free up funds to develop new spaceships that can travel beyond the station's 220-mile-high orbit.