Listen for the space shuttle tonight

If you hear two familiar sonic booms about 7 tonight, that means the space shuttle Endeavour is on its way back to Cape Canaveral for a 7:05 p.m. landing. NASA says it's hard to tell whether the sound of the booms will carry all the way to the Tampa Bay area, because it depends on atmospheric conditions.

The shuttle will fly over Florida's east coast en route to the Kennedy Space Center, unless weather delays the landing. In that case, NASA could choose to send Endeavour around Earth one more time, which would delay the landing about 90 minutes. For the later landing, the shuttle would take a different route, passing just south of Tampa Bay and across Florida, and we would almost certainly hear the booms.

Endeavour launched March 11 for a mission that included setting up a new Canadian-built robot on the exterior of the international space station, and carrying up the first part of a Japanese-built space lab.

Curtis Krueger, Times staff writer