A European
space freighter the size of a London double-decker bus is headed for a fiery
death on Monday with a team of scientists hoping for a ringside seat.
Researchers
from NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and other groups are preparing to
watch from afar as the unmanned
cargo ship Jules Verne plunges through the Earth's atmosphere and burns up
over the Pacific Ocean after a successful supply run to the International Space
Station. The spacecraft's demise will mark a dramatic end for the first of ESA's
new fleet of Automated Transfer Vehicles.
"With the
reentry of Jules Verne, there is a certain sadness at the conclusion of what
has been such a successful mission," ESA's ATV mission manager John Ellwood
told SPACE.com. "However, we know that all the mission requirements were
met or exceeded and this has given a great satisfaction to the enormous team
which has worked on this amazing project."
Flight
controllers at ESA's ATV Mission Control in Toulouse, France, are expected to
direct the 19-ton Jules Verne to fire its engines one last time at 9:30 a.m.
EDT (1330 GMT) on Monday to start a controlled death dive. About 12 minutes
after tumbling into the Earth's atmosphere, the spacecraft should burst into
pieces and burn up, with any remaining fragments splashing into the Pacific Ocean.
The team of
about 55 scientists based
out of Tahiti hope to watch Jules Verne's final minutes from two chase
planes flying about 373 miles (600 km) apart. The observation campaign has two
goals:
- Obtain a
first-hand look at how Jules Verne reenters to aid in better ATV designs
in the future.
- Use the
relatively rare event of a planned spacecraft destruction to shed light on
how natural fireballs like meteors explode as they enter Earth's
atmosphere.
"We know
their size and their impact speed, and we know the exact moment they're coming
down," said Peter Jenniskens, the observation campaign's mission scientist at
NASA's Ames Research Center and the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif. "None
of that happens with natural fireballs, so with these events you can set your
cameras up and you can wait for it and observe it come in."
Launched on
March 8 EDT, Jules Verne is a massive
cylindrical spacecraft about 15 feet (4.5 meters) wide and 32 feet (10
meters) long that delivered about 8 tons of supplies astronauts aboard the
International Space Station.
The
spacecraft is designed to be disposable and undocked from the space station on
Sept. 5. ESA officials plan to build at least five ATVs to resupply
space station crews in return for European astronaut slots on future
long-duration missions. Jules Verne's successor, ATV 2, is under construction
for launch in 2010.
"This will
obviously be used to update our predictions for future ATVs," Ellwood said of
watching Jules Verne's destruction.
Jenniskens
and his team hope to track Jules Verne's reentry as the spacecraft flies
between 46 and 31 miles (75-50 km) above the Pacific Ocean.
"It's a large
object, so it should be bright enough for us to observe really well,"
Jenniskens told SPACE.com. "And it's a destructive reentry, so it's an object
that's not protected by a heat shield. It's going to break into pieces."
Past
returning spacecraft, like NASA's 2006
Stardust landing and 2004 reentry of Genesis, were protected by a heat
shield, giving observers a single, bright target. Jules Verne is unprotected,
with much of its reentry light coming from its melting aluminum hull and shock
emissions, Jenniskens said.
"We have
some idea for what you can expect we made some predictions based on the ATV
being intact...but what we're going to see, that's the big question," said
Jenniskens. "It's very exciting."
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