Europe's ATV space freighter set for station visit

An Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV), Europe's giant space freighter, has been cleared for lift-off on Friday from Kourou in French Guiana.

The unmanned craft will ride to orbit on an Ariane rocket to resupply the International Space Station (ISS).

It will deliver food, water, air, fuel and spares to help maintain operations on the high-flying astronaut outpost.

At 20 tonnes, the ATV is the biggest ship servicing the station now that the US shuttles have been retired.

"The ATV is very significant, and the ISS is strongly relying on it," said Nico Dettmann, who runs the freighter programme at the European Space Agency (Esa).

"We've taken a lot of care over quality, and we're proud of this vehicle. I've said it before, but this is the most complex vehicle Esa has ever developed," he told BBC News.

The truck will blast skyward at 01:34 local Kourou time (04:34 GMT).

The ascent to a circular orbit should last about 63 minutes. The Ariane will place the ship at an altitude of about 260km, from where it will fire its own thrusters to raise itself to the 390km-high ISS.

A docking at the rear of the orbiting platform is expected late next Wednesday (GMT).

This ATV is the third sent to the station, and has been dubbed Edoardo Amaldi in honour of the 20th Century Italian physicist (a co-discoverer of slow neutrons, which made nuclear power possible).

Two previous vehicles have been flown, in 2008 and 2011.

The trucks are part of the barter arrangement that Esa has with its international partners on the ISS project.

Instead of handing over cash to cover station running costs, Europe has taken on the major responsibility of platform logistics.

In return, it gets residency rights for its astronauts - one individual to spend six months in orbit, every couple of years.

The current flier, Dutchman Andre Kuipers, will be on hand at the ISS to help unload the truck when it arrives.

The total cargo mass of ATV-Edoardo Amaldi - if you add in the fuel the ship uses for its in-orbit manoeuvres - will be just over 6.5 tonnes.

This includes the largest ever load of dry cargo - everything from new toothbrushes to Lego kits for use in education demonstrations.

Items with more significance than children's toys include components for new scientific experiments and an American unit to recycle urine into drinking water.

Europe plans to send two further freighters to the station, in 2013 and 2014.

These ships will fulfil Esa's commitments to the ISS partners through to about 2016.

Europe must then work out how to meet its "subscription" up to 2020, the current planned limit for operations on the orbiting platform.

One solution that has been suggested is that the ATV's service module (the part of the craft that drives it through space) be evolved into a tug that can carry the manned deep-space capsule that the US is now developing to go beyond the space station, to destinations such as asteroids and Mars.

"There are different opportunities under consideration," said Michael Menking from Astrium, the pan-European space company that leads the production of ATVs from Bremen, Germany.

"ATV has a programmatic duty to pay the ISS operation obligation to the Americans.

"Therefore, it is very important that whatever we do as an evolution of ATV, it can be bartered with the Americans. And that means they have to agree to it," he told BBC News.

"On the other side, it's also important that we do something for Europe that develops the baseline technology and innovation we have in this vehicle."

There is currently an Esa study codenamed VAC, for Versatile Autonomous Concept.

This is looking at the idea of a big spacecraft derived from the ATV that could do a variety of jobs in low Earth orbit, such as docking with redundant satellites and pulling them out of the sky.

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