CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) – The last mission of NASA”s shuttle was postponed until November, so that scientists adapted a particle detector than 2,000 million dollars for a long life on the International Space Station, officials said Monday .

There are three shuttle flights and the U.S. space agency planned to close the program on 30 September with the closure of the Discovery mission to resupply the space station.

That mission now delayed until after the launch of Endeavour to the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS for its acronym in English), a project of 16 countries monitored by Samuel Tigg, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and winner of Nobel.

“It was clear that the (Endeavour) could not fly in July as was evident,” said NASA spokesman Kyle Herring.

AMS, designed to detect anti-matter particles and other strange forms of matter in space, would fly in July. But with the Government”s proposal to extend the space station program until at least 2020, scientists decided to change the cryogenic superconducting magnet, which they believed would last three years by a permanent magnet that would last between 10 and 18.

“We started thinking about it late last year and early January when people spoke of reaching the space station by 2020 and beyond,” Ting said in an interview.

“I began to realize that we would have a museum piece,” he said.

Remove the liquid helium cooled magnet of AMS reduces the power of the apparatus for bending the path of charged cosmic particles while cross five different detectors.

But Ting said that adding more precision detectors and additional years in orbit more than offset the loss.

The magnet replacement, who was sent on a prototype of AMS in a 1998 shuttle mission, was taken from a warehouse in Germany and tested. There were no demotions and arrive at CERN – European Organization for Nuclear Research – in Geneva, where it will assemble this week.

latest release The delay will give a little respite to thousands of Kennedy Space Center workers who prepare takeoffs.

The request of President Barack Obama for the NASA budget for the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1, which must be approved by Congress includes $ 600 million to maintain the program until the end of the year if necessary, to accommodate delays due to technical or weather.

The change in plans would not affect the final flight plan for the shuttle Atlantis, which should take off on May 14 carrying a Russian docking port to the station.

(Published in Spanish by Marion Giraldo)