European spaceship blazes home - September 29, 2008
Posted on behalf of Ashley Yeager
It’s a plane. It’s a meteor. Nope, it’s Jules Verne.
The European Space Agency (ESA) craft, an Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV), blazed across the sky and then smashed into the Pacific Ocean on Monday. Jules Verne, Europe's biggest, most sophisticated spaceship, was heading back to Earth with trash after stocking the International Space Station with food, water and other supplies. Scientists intentionally let the atmosphere shred Jules Verne to shed light on how natural fireballs like meteors explode as they enter Earth's atmosphere.
During controlled burns of spacecrafts, "we know their size and their impact speed, and we know the exact moment they're coming down," Peter Jenniskens, the Jules Verne observation campaign's mission scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center and the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Califofnia, told Space.com. "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," he said.
The scientists are currently analyzing the data to learn about those natural fireballs and to understand how to safely destroy future ATVs. ESA has contracts with its international partners to design and use at least four more crafts to service the space station in the coming years. The next is due to launch in 2010. It's also likely that an ATV will help destroy the space station when it no longer can be serviced towards the end of the next decade, BBC News reports.
Image: ESA
