ESA’s Jules Verne Doing Extremely Well

The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Jules Verne Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) successfully performed two boosts on Wednesday. They brought the spacecraft to an altitude of 303 km, half-way between the insertion orbit reached after last Sunday’s launch and the orbit of the International Space Station (ISS). The boosts used two of the four main engines on the ATV. Each boost lasted for approximately 2 minutes and provided a change in velocity of just over 6 m/s. Today’s burns came on top of two burns conducted by mission controllers at ESA’s ATV Control Centre yesterday.

Jules Verne ATV launched from Kourou, French Guiana, on Sunday, March 9th. The maneuvers overall boosted the altitude of Jules Verne by approximately 20 km and have positioned the ATV behind and below the ISS, which is at an altitude of 340 km, with the two orbiting craft separated by a phase angle of approximately 280 degrees. Following the first burn at 13:20 CET, the second burn, at 14:01 CET, was commanded and monitored using ESA’s own Artemis relay satellite, due to a gap in TDRS relay satellite coverage at that time, making the manoeuvre an all-European activity. In the next two days the ATV team will try out one of the spacecraft’s main safety features – the Collision Avoidance Manoeuvre, or CAM. Jules Verne ATV is equipped with a completely independent system with which ATV can be given a boost away from the Space Station if necessary during the craft’s automated docking procedure. A CAM would be executed using a completely independent control system, sensors and thrusters, managed by a separate computer which in turn uses software developed completely separately from the rest of the ATV.