KOROLYOV, near Moscow. June 17 (Interfax-AVN) - The European Space Agency's fourth Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV-4), Albert Einstein, on Saturday made contact with the Russian segment of the International Space Station, the ESA's Russian office told Interfax-AVN.
Albert Einstein made four stops in approaching the ISS - it stopped at distances of 3.5 kilometers, 250 meters, 20 meters and 12 meters from the station. The docking process could have been canceled during any of them had anything gone wrong.
In heading for the ISS, Albert Einstein used the GPS navigation system when it was a long way from the station but went over to a visiometer when it was getting close to it. The craft also has one of the Russian-designed Kurs systems installed on it but that was only used as a means of visual control of the rendezvous process.
The docking occurred 20 minutes later than planned as the ESA had needed extra time to check the station's European-made laser reflectors - there were fears that the reflectors had been damaged by a rendezvous antenna on Russia's Progress M-19M resupply spacecraft that had failed to unfold.
The head of ESA's Moscow office, Rene Pichel, who was present at the Russian Mission Control Center during the rendezvous process, told reporters it was minutes before Albert Einstein made contact with the ISS that it became clear the reflectors were undamaged.
Pichel said that calculations and tests carried out by Russia's Energia Rocket and Space Corporation after the antenna accident had shown that the antenna had come very close to the reflectors, which stirred fears it had hit them. When Progress undocked from the station, the antenna cover was visibly bent, he said.
Pichel said all the reflectors installed on the station's Zvezda instrument module performed well during Albert Einstein's docking with it.
He said three reflectors are needed for an ATV to dock with the ISS, and that, if any of them had been damaged, Albert Einstein would have stayed put near the station.
ATVs are the only vehicles besides Progress craft that can refuel and orient the ISS and adjust its orbit. They can also maneuver the station out of potential collisions with orbital waste.
ATV-1, Jules Verne, was launched in 2008, ATV-2, Johannes Kepler, in 2011, and ATV-3, Edoardo Amaldi, in 2012. ATV-5, named after Belgian scientist Georges Lemaitre, is due to go into space in 2014.
ATVs, which are manufactured by Astrium, a subsidiary of the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company (EADS), are 10.3 meters long, are 34.5 meters in diameter, and consist of two modules - a cargo compartment and a service module.
Today's ISS crew are Russians Pavel Vinogradov, Aleksandr Misurkin and Fyodor Yurchikhin, Americans Christopher Cassidy and Karen Nyberg, and Italian Luca Parmitano.