The Automated Transfer Vehicle or ATV is an expendable, unmanned resupply spacecraft developed by the European Space Agency (ESA). ATVs are designed to supply the International Space Station (ISS) with propellant, water, air, payloads, and experiments. ATVs can also reboost the station into a higher orbit.
Three ATVs, Jules Verne, Johannes Kepler and Edoardo Amaldi, have been launched since March 2008. ESA has contracted suppliers to produce two more ATVs to be flown before 2015. On 2 April 2012 the ESA announced that the ATV program would end after the fifth ATV is launched in 2014.
Further developments of the ATV have been studied by the European Space Agency and EADS Astrium. ESA member states decided in 2012 that the ATV would be adapted to serve as the service module of the NASA Orion spacecraft.
Read more about Automated Transfer Vehicle: Design, Development, Use, Missions, ATV Control Centre, ATV Evolution Proposals
Famous quotes containing the words automated, transfer and/or vehicle:
“Nature is a self-made machine, more perfectly automated than any automated machine. To create something in the image of nature is to create a machine, and it was by learning the inner working of nature that man became a builder of machines.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)
“I have proceeded ... to prevent the lapse from ... the point of blending between wakefulness and sleep.... Not ... that I can render the point more than a point—but that I can startle myself ... into wakefulness—and thus transfer the point ... into the realm of Memory—convey its impressions,... to a situation where ... I can survey them with the eye of analysis.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“If you are to reach masses of people in this world, you must do it by a sign language. Whether your vehicle be commerce, literature, or politics, you can do nothing but raise signals, and make motions to the people.”
—John Jay Chapman (1862–1933)