At the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana, the most complex automated spacecraft built by Europe is getting ready to launch in late February or early March.
The Jules Verne Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) is a huge craft, built for human spaceflight, but intended to be used primarily for hauling cargo to and from the International Space Station (ISS). Its builders, the European Space agency, call it the space going equivalent of a "combination of a tugboat and a river barge."
It's a new kind of mission for the ESA, which built the Columbus science module currently waiting to fly on the rescheduled Atlantis shuttle mission (currently slated for a Feb. 7 launch), but has largely left the hauling to the United States or Russia.
The ATV – the first of as many as ten planned – will by contrast be launched into orbit atop an Ariane-5 rocket from the European Kourou facility, and guided automatically into conjunction with the ISS. Filled with supplies for the crew, it will then serve as a pressurized module, linked to the Russian service module, for six months or so, and then re-launched, full of ISS plumbing waste and other detritus, into a final destructive splash-down into the Pacific Ocean.
Naturally, European engineers are eager to get the craft off the ground. But it has to wait until the Atlantis mission is complete, since both will use the same tracking tools to control their docking procedures.
Here's John Ellwood, ESA's ATV mission manager, talking to the BBC about the hurry-up-and-wait schedule:
Space cargo ship near completion [BBC]
ATV 'Jules Verne' presented at media briefing[ESA]
(Image: The Jules Verne ATV, being fueled at the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana. Credit: ESA)
