Europe's
first orbital cargo ship is pulling double duty as an astronaut washroom and will spend an extra month at the International Space
Station (ISS).
The European
Space Agency (ESA) extended the mission of its unmanned space
freighter Jules Verne, the first of a new fleet of disposable Automated
Transfer Vehicles (ATV), to September to give the station one more month to draw on
its rocket fuel supply.
Since the spacecraft's April arrival, station astronauts
have slept, worked and played inside its roomy interior as they move cargo and,
unexpectedly, use its water tank for their daily washing,
ESA officials said.
"It's like
we added a new room onto the aft end of the service module," NASA astronaut
Peggy Whitson, who commanded the station during Jules Verne's arrival, told SPACE.com
after returning home in late April. "It was just a really incredible increase
in volume aboard the space station."
Jules Verne
is a cylindrical spacecraft about the size of a double decker London bus and is
powered by four wing-like solar panels that lend it the appearance of a
squat dragonfly in orbit. It measures about 32 feet (10 meters) long and 15
feet (4.5 meters) wide.
The extra room is apparently appreciated by station astronauts, who made a special request to use the spacecraft as an extra sleeping space, as well as for bathing and washing their hair with their rinseless, alcohol-free shampoo, ESA officials said.
"The ATV's
pressurized cabin offers the crew a large space, a lot of privacy and it also
helps to keep the station air humidity level lower," said ESA ATV mission
director Herve Côme of the ATV Control Centre in Toulouse, France, in a statement.
Jules Verne
launched toward the station on March 8 (ET) and spent weeks conducting
rendezvous tests before
docking at the end of the station's Russian-built Zvezda service module. The
spacecraft is designed to haul nearly 8 tons of cargo to the station — about three
times that of Russia's unmanned Progress supply ships — then dispose of trash
and unneeded items by burning up over the Pacific Ocean during reentry.
ESA
officials spent 1.3 billion Euros ($1.9 billion) developing Jules Verne and
plan to launch four more ATVs to the station in return for including European
astronauts on future long-duration missions to the orbital lab.
The
spacecraft is just one of several new additions to the space station this year.
In February, astronauts delivered Europe's
Columbus laboratory to the ISS, then followed a month later with a small
storage room for the space station's Japanese
Kibo module.
Jules Verne
docked at the station on April 3, setting the stage for the delivery Japan's
main Kibo lab, a 37-foot (11-meter) room about the size of a large tour
bus. Astronauts aboard NASA's shuttle Discovery spent two weeks installing the new
Japanese module at the station earlier this month.
Meanwhile,
in the past week Jules Verne has successfully refueled the space station's
rocket propellant tanks and boosted the outpost's orbit by 4.3 miles (7 km) to
an altitude of about 214 miles (345 km) during a 20-minute engine burn.
"Jules
Verne is an incredible spaceship; it is performing beyond our best hopes," said
Alberto Novelli, chief of ESA's ATV mission operations at the cargo ship's control
center. "ATV has fulfilled all its objectives perfectly and on top of that,
several new functions have been made possible that we did not initially plan
for."
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