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Europe's Automated Cargo Shuttle Docks With Space Station
An anonymous reader writes "A successful docking of the Automated Transfer Vehicle dubbed 'Jules Verne' occurred earlier this week. The first of its kind, the crewless ship reached orbit and lightly touched up against the international space station on Thursday. By now astronauts on the ISS will have opened its doors and begun air circulation in preparation of offloading the nearly 7.5 tons of fuel, oxygen, food, clothing and equipment they need to survive. The EU Space Agency sees this as a historic journey for the program: 'The Jules Verne, named after the visionary French science fiction author, is the first of a new class of station supply ships called Automatic Transfer Vehicles. The craft was built by the nations of the European Space Agency as one of Europe's major contributions to the international station. "The docking of the A.T.V. is a new and spectacular step in the demonstration of European capabilities on the international scene of space exploration," said Jean-Jacques Dordain, director general of the European Space Agency.'"
The Progress isn't even the first automated Soviet freighter, so, no, this is far from the first automated transport spacecraft. They even used some Russian parts. Typical ESA over-statement (or outright lie). Just the latest in a long line - "first ion thruster" (although theirs was a Russian design that had been in use for 20+years) and NASA and some commercial entities has also used them), "first 3-axis stabilized spacecraft to be operated without any gyro" (although numerous US missions have used gyroless control dating back close to 50 years), etc.
Completely unnecessary in this case, because they had a legitimate claim to an accomplishment this time. Their terminal guidance and overall control appeared to have been *far* superior to the typical Soviet system. Much smoother and neater and apparently much finer control.
Brett
With so much energy invested in boosting the transport into orbit, you'd think that they'd want to hold onto the materials once up there. They'd be very valuable in due course.
Unfortunately the ISS is in too low an orbit for that, ie. a scrap yard at that low altitude would reenter pretty soon. The space station itself needs to be reboosted up periodically (a really daft design decision).
There's no reason why the transport couldn't boost itself much further out once it has delivered its cargo though. The energy cost isn't large, and there's no time constraint so even ion jets could be used.
I gotta wonder.. If the US had done this, would we be reading about this on Thursday or Saturday ?
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Remember, NASA and the vast majority of the space community are still stuck in the von Braun vision: station, shuttle, Moon, Mars.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Asteroids come with retroreflectors preinstalled? Asteroids provide such a predictable environment that the exact same approach can be rehearsed countless times in a lab beforehand?
IMHO, the DARPA Urban Grand Challenge moved the science closer to unpredictable real-world mining than this. (though admittedly, both relied heavily on laser rangefinders)
Why no gyro? Gyros don't need any fuel for attitude control, just solar power. What advantage does not having gyros give you?
With the Russian accident in mind, why do they still dock the same way ? From what i've read, a collision could, due to the size of the capsule could be catastrophic. Couldn't they make the capsule approach the space station in a parrallel course rather than heads on, than use the robotic arms or something equivalent to pull the capsule in ? of couse that would mean that they would have to redesign the capsule.