In just a few days time, the historical Jules Verne mission will come to a close. After the ATV Control Centre commands the opening of the Automated Transfer Vehicle hooks, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) first resupply and reboost vehicle will perform a fully automated undocking with the International Space Station on September 5th at 23:30 CEST (21:30 UT). The undocking of the Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) will conclude the remarkably successful five-month attached phase of the mission, and mark the end of Jules Verne’s main servicing mission to deliver cargo, propellant, water, oxygen, and propulsion capacity to the Station. Since its perfect launch on March 9th, Jules Verne ATV has achieved each scheduled objective and much more.
Following a successful test of its anti-collision maneuver system, ATV demonstrated the high level performance of its precise rendezvous piloting, navigation, and control. Then, after a superb final approach and docking on April 3rd, the spacecraft completed all resupply tasks and even provided capabilities unplanned before its mission, such as a debris avoidance maneuver for the International Space Station (ISS), recovering large amounts of stored condensation water from the ISS in its empty tanks, and offering a new comfortable sleeping area for Space Station crew members. After automatically transferring its entire 811 kg of refuelling propellant to the ISS in June, and resupplying the orbital outpost with 269 litres of water and 21 kg of air, ATV activities during the last week of August were dedicated to transferring dozens of white cargo bags from the ATV’s pressurized cabin to the ISS.
Once its resupply mission is completed, the ATV, with its waste securely strapped and stored in the racks, will be manually closed by the crew on September 4th. A day later, Jules Verne ATV will be separated under control of the ATV-CC and Russian Mission Control Centre in Moscow (MCC-M). On September 29th, the ATV main engines will use their remaining fuel in two separate deorbit boosts to terminate the 3-week solo flight of Jules Verne. They will deorbit the 13.5-ton spacecraft on a steep flight path, performing a controlled destructive re-entry high above a completely uninhabited area of the Pacific Ocean. The planning of this event in the night time will allow observation from two aircrafts containing a collection of NASA scientific experiments allowing ultraviolet, radar, and spectrometric observations. In addition, the ISS crew might be able to observe ATV re-entry with the Russian ultraviolet and spectrometric instrument, called FIALKA.
