Another day at the office… except that my office right now is a set of rooms, well-equipped with computers, screens and experts of all kinds and nationalities. After my trip to Kourou, it was great to walk into the control room at ATV-CC and plunge back into the ‘normal’ work of following the ATV mission.

ATV-CC one hour before ATV-5 launch. Credits: ESA

ATV-CC one hour before ATV-5 launch. Credits: ESA

My colleagues had, as always, been quite busy since launch. As mentioned in a previous blog posting (by mission director Jean Michel Bois), one of the four propulsion chains (PDE) was isolated immediately after separation from Ariane.

In a vehicle as complex as ATV, failures can occur in a unit or – frequently the case – in the sensors used for monitoring. The ATV is robust to a large set of ‘foreseen’ failures, so nominal operations continued.

The Engineering Support Team (EST) experts, ably supported by their off-site colleagues in Les Mureaux and in Germany, quickly identified the proper actions to be taken to:

  • Allow the problem to be understood
  • Cope with the short-term effects
  • Propose a short-term solution, and
  • Propose a long-term solution

The short-term solution, masking the offending alarm while adding extra monitoring on some related parameters, was agreed on Saturday. It was successfully implemented by the teams today.

Conclusion: The root cause was understood. George is now back to its nominal configuration, with all four propulsion chains up and running.

The teams are now busy working out various details of upcoming operations, which will, if all goes well, lead to docking on 12 August. As usual the planners are kept very busy… ours is a very fluid environment!

Yesterday was Sunday. In case you are wondering what off-duty space engineers do in their spare time, I can tell you we all went to the cinema and watched Moonwalk1 a re-released documentary about the Apollo 11 mission with fabulous images… neat!