Next week at the European Astronaut Center my crewmate Sasha and I will have our first week of ATV training.
ATV is the Automated Transfer Vehicle, the cargo resupply spaceship of the European Space Agency. It docks automatically to the Service Module of the Russian Segment using the Russian Docking System (the same one as the Soyuz) but a different suite of extremely precise docking sensors.
You can not take over control of ATV from ISS and fly it manually to docking, but crews are trained to monitor the rendezvous and send contingency commands to interrupt the approach if necessary.
So far, four ATVs have flown and all of them have docked flawlessly with great precision. ATV4 Albert Einstein is on ISS right now. The last one, ATV5 Georges Lemaître will fly next year and should still be on Station when my crewmates and I arrive.
In this beautiful picture, taken by Don Pettit, you can see the arrival of ATV3 Edoardo Amaldi last year!
ATV-3 arriving. Credits: NASA
15/09/2013