After the success that the STS-122 mission represented, allowing the attachment and the beggining of operations by ESA’s Columbus laboratory, the next milestone will take place one week from now, on the March 8, at 01:28 local time, 05:28 CET, when Europe’s Jules Verne, the first Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) will make its way towards the International Space Station.
The vehicle will be transported into orbit by a special version of the Ariane 5 launcher scheduled to lift off from Europe’s spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana.
To give us an idea of the importance of Jules Verne for the ISS and for the European Space Agency I have invited John Ellwood, ATV Mission Manager to share his thoughts with spacEurope’s readers, here’s the result:
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A STEPPING STONE
The flight of Jules Verne is inspirational in many ways. Obviously designing, building, testing and flying the most complicated spacecraft in Europe is amazing in itself.
In fact ATV consists of various elements - it has the pressurised module with all the crew interfaces - it has a very complicated main spacecraft designed to the stringent man rated requirements ( two fault tolerance) - it has a completely independent spacecraft to check that the first spacecraft is safe - and at the back end it has a propulsion stage to take the vehicle to the right orbit and to reboost the ISS.
ATV is also one of the major elements of Europe being on the ISS.
Both the spacecraft and launcher are completely European and it's purpose is to pay for the European operating costs of the ISS.
This is therefore a major part of Europe's participation in this fantastic manned space venture, probably one of the largest peaceful international projects, which is not only going to perform fantastic microgravity science using ESA's Columbus but also the whole concept of astronauts performing these tasks in space is itself inspirational, especially for the youth of today.
Lasty I believe we have to think of the ISS as a stepping stone for future manned space exploration.
Not only are we studying how man behaves over a long period in space but we are also developing technology which will used for this future exploration.
In the case of ATV, this is exemplified by the very advanced automatic rendezvous and docking techniques, using optical sensors, that we have developed in Europe, which will be necessary for many missions; for example a sample return mission from Mars.
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