ATV Views Space Station As Never Before

December 10, 2014

Image Caption: ESAs Automated Transfer Vehicle Georges Lematre seen from the International Space Station as it approaches for docking in August 2014. To the right of the ESA logo, three cameras around the front cone form part of the Laser Infrared Imaging Sensors, or LIRIS, experiment that demonstrated new rendezvous and docking technology. The lidar optical head and its box of electronics sit just above the ESA logo and form the second element of the tracking system. Credit: ESA/NASA/RoscosmosO. Artemyev

Provided by ESA

ESAs fifth and last Automated Transfer Vehicle tested a new technique before docking with the International Space Station in August, at the same time revealing the orbital complex in a new light.

ATV Georges Lematre demonstrated a set of European sensors that offers future improvements on the autonomous rendezvous and docking that these ferries have completed five times since 2008. ESAs goal is to perform an automated rendezvous further from home perhaps near Mars or with an uncooperative target such as an inert object.

Seeing through an eclipse

During Georges Lematres rendezvous using its proven system, the Laser Infrared Imaging Sensors, or LIRIS, experiment was turned on some two and a half hours and 3500 m from the Space Station. All of the sensors worked as expected and a large amount of data was recorded and stored on hard disks in ATVs cargo hold.

The disks were retrieved by ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst on 29 August and returned to Earth in Soyuz TMA-12M in September. The information is now being compared against the results from ATVs normal navigation sensors.

With ATV-5 pointing directly at the Station, the LIRIS infrared cameras tracked the weightless research Centre perfectly despite several 30-minute periods in darkness when the Sun was eclipsed by Earth and traditional cameras would have gone blind.

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ATV Views Space Station As Never Before