Launched on April 5th and having landed on April 20th, Discovery’s flight STS-131 marks the longest mission for the orbiter. During the six week that photographers Scott Andrews, his son Philip Scott Andrew, and Stan Jirman spent in and around the Orbiter Processing Facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, they took thousands of photos of the staff preparing Discovery for the mission.
The photographers condensed their shots into a glorious four-minute time-lapse video that chronicles Discovery’s trip from the processing facility to the pad, and eventually to the launch itself. It’s quite amazing to watch – there isn’t any audio on the clip,so we’d suggest Black Sabbath’s Into the Void as a good accompaniment. Check out Go For Launch! below.
BONUS: While we’re on on the topic of NASA, two of their satellites have been monitoring the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The movement of the spill has been captured in images which since been compiled into a time-lapse video. See that after the jump.