ESA’s 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 Lemaître 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. ESA’s 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 Lemaître’s 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 ATV’s 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 ATV’s 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.
SOURCE ESA, read more..
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