Ship to undock from space station
Print Edition
A EUROPEAN supply ship will undock from the International Space Station today as scheduled but be destroyed 12 days earlier than planned because of a power hitch, the European Space Agency said yesterday.
The Automated Transfer Vehicle Georges Lemaitre will separate from the ISS at 9:44pm Beijing time today at the end of its six-month mission, the ESA said.
But the loss of one of its four power sources means that, as a precaution, the ATV will be destroyed tomorrow rather than on February 27 as planned.
“It’s a minor concern rather than a critical problem,” said Dominique Siruguet, deputy head of ESA’s ATV program.
“The ATV has four solar panels,” he said.
“It can operate as normal using three power chains, but even if this were reduced to two, it would still be able to separate from the ISS and perform re-entry satisfactorily.”
Re-entry entails sending the vehicle earthward at a steep angle so that it burns up on friction with the atmosphere at hypersonic speeds.
The ATV is the fifth and final cargo ship that ESA contracted to provide for the United States-led ISS project.
Named after the father of the “Big Bang” theory, the spaceship is designed to navigate by starlight and dock automatically with the manned outpost.
The 10-meter-long ATV was launched in August, bringing 6.6 tons of fuel, water, oxygen, food and scientific experiments for the six ISS crew. The plan was to use the ATV’s death plunge as an experiment to provide data for the ISS’s own demise, which is sketched for about 2024. The idea was to see whether a shallower angle of re-entry would help burn up the ISS, which has a mass of about 420 tons. The experiment has been scrapped and a conventional re-entry operation will now take place, ESA said.
It is scheduled for Monday at about 2:12am, ESA said.
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