U.S. space shuttle Endeavour landed safely at Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Wednesday morning, ending its 19-year flying career.

U.S. space shuttle Endeavour landed safely at Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Wednesday morning, ending its 19-year flying career.

Based on NASA Tv, Endeavour touched down at 2:35 a.m. EDT (0635 GMT) right after a 16-day service mission to the International Space Station (ISS).

Endeavour has traveled 196 million km by flight's end -- on all 25 of its voyages -- and spent 299 days in space. It's the youngest of NASA's shuttle fleet, initial flying in 1992 as the replacement for Challenger, which was destroyed shortly after liftoff in 1986, killing its seven crew members.

"122 million miles flown during 25 challenging spaceflights," Mission Control told Endeavour commander Mark Kelly and his crewmates. "Your landing ends a vibrant legacy for this amazing vehicle that will long be remembered. Welcome house, Endeavour."

"It's sad to see her land for the last time, but she actually has a great legacy," Kelly replied.

Endeavour blasted off on May 16 from the Kennedy Space Center to deliver to the ISS a 2-billion-dollar, multinational particle detector referred to as the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS).

The AMS is developed to search for different forms of unusual matter by measuring cosmic rays. Its experiments will aid researchers study the formation of the universe and search for evidence of dark matter, strange matter and antimatter.

Throughout their remain at the station, the Endeavour crew conducted four spacewalks to complete construction of the U.S. side of the 100-billion-dollar space station, a project of 16 nations that has been assembled in orbit considering that 1998.

They also brought up a logistics carrier with spare parts and performed maintenance and installation work in the course of four spacewalks, the last to be carried out by an American shuttle crew.

NASA plans to decommission Endeavour, which will likely be the second shuttle to be retired; it ultimately will land at the California Science Center in Los Angeles. Discovery ended its last voyage in March; its final destination can be a Smithsonian Institution hangar outside Washington. Atlantis will remain at Kennedy Space Center as a tourist quit.

NASA's 30-year-old shuttle program is ending as a result of high operating expenses. The Obama administration wants to spur private companies to get into the space taxi business, freeing NASA to focus on deep space exploration and new technology development.

When the U.S. space shuttle program ends later this year, the Russian space program's Soyuz capsule will probably be the only approach for transporting astronauts to and from the ISS.

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