Control of the ATV Jules Verne

- A user manual (28 volumes)

- The ATV system operations reference (14 volumes)

- A support team of 20 experts

The challenge for Astrium, the manufacturer of the Jules Verne ATV, was to design the vehicle while specifying the way in which the ATV must be controlled and monitored by the ATV control centre (ATV CC), and the International Space Station and its crew. All this had to be done within the environment imposed by Ariane 5, the GPS, the ISS, the TDRSS and ARTEMIS.

This work was carried out for the European Space Agency (ESA) at two levels. The first level concerned the vehicle and its user manual, and the second level concerned the vehicle’s mission and its integrated operation within the entire system formed by the ATV and the station.

The user manual contains all the operating instructions that explain to each ‘operator’ what to monitor and how to control the vehicle. These operational instructions cover the entire mission of the ATV, both nominal and failure situations.

All these operating instructions make up the ATV user manual, which consists of nine volumes dedicated to the general operation of the vehicle, and 19 volumes dedicated to the sub-systems.

The user manual covers:

• The control and monitoring tools for the entire vehicle; the commands to the ATV (6000); the telemetry parameters (35,000); and the loadable and unloadable storage areas of the software and the on-board equipment.
• The sending of commands from the ATV CC to the ATV in the form of computerised procedures that are specifically formatted for the ATV control centre. More than 900 vehicle control procedures (VCP) have been produced and validated by Astrium.
• All the on-board mission plans (OMP) covering all flight phases.
• 1,100 small software programmes designed to calculate the ‘derived’ parameters on the ground.
• 1,400 alarms for the monitoring of the ATV by the ATV CC.
• All the data relating to the ATV that is required by the various ATV CC tools.
• More than 3,000 vehicle data items (VDI).

Acting on behalf of ESA, Astrium and all its partners have put together the reference material for the implementation and operations of the ATV throughout its mission. This system operations reference defines the distribution of roles between the ATV and the ISS Houston and ISS Moscow control centres, and the crew of the ISS for each mission phase. It defines and explains the operations that must be carried out by these operational units, along with their logical and sequential order, to handle the execution of each of the flight phases. The system operations reference covers both nominal and non-nominal situations.

The ATV system operations reference consists of 14 volumes each dedicated to a different one of the mission phases.

It is broken down into all procedures and operations plans for each of the control centres (the ATV control centre, the Moscow or Houston mission control centres) and the crew of the ISS.

At the request of the European Space Agency, 20 Astrium experts will join the engineering support team (EST) set up by ESA. The EST is an ESA unit that reports directly to the mission manager, the ESA ATV project manager, and reports operationally to the ESA mission director and the CNES (French space agency) flight director.

During the flight, Astrium will keep the core of the design and qualification teams for the ATV vehicle on standby in Les Mureaux to respond to technical emergencies. If necessary, this control room can also call on the support of the ATV industrial team.

The control room will be called upon in the event of complex failures to carry out the technical investigations, identify repair methods or workarounds, and then define and validate these methods in order to provide all of the technical or operational elements (procedures, software patches, etc.) in return that will allow the ATV control centre to continue the flight.

Since the end of 2003, four Astrium engineers from the ATV development teams have been working with the teams at the ATV control centre as part of a contract between the CNES and Astrium Les Mureaux.

Under the terms of a contract that is separate from the development of the ATV, the European Space Agency has tasked Astrium Bremen with the development of the AGCS. Astrium Bremen is to integrate the simulator. Astrium Les Mureaux is providing the ATV flight application software, the simulation models, and the simulator validation and configuration procedures issued from the ATV qualification tests.

This simulator has been used intensively by the control centre for over a year for the training and operational qualification of the ATV control centre.