ESA's second Automated Transfer Vehicle, Johannes Kepler, completed docking with the Zvezda’s aft end cone of the International Space Station today at 16:08 GMT delivering fresh equipment, rocket fuel and oxygen to the orbital outpost.
Contact and Capture occurred at 15:59 GMT.
The arrival of the 20-tonnes unmanned spaceship occurred a couple of hours before NASA's Space Shuttle Discovery STS-133 was cleared for blastoff on its last orbital voyage before retirement. Liftoff is planned for 21:50 GMT from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Controlled and monitored by the ATV Control Centre in Toulouse, France, as well as the astronauts on the Station the approach and docking were achieved autonomously by its own computers. Although both ATV and the ISS orbit at 28 000 km/h, the relative speed during final approach remained below 7 cm/sec and the accuracy within a few centimetres.
The docking of Johannes Kepler will be followed by Discovery's docking, carrying the European-built Leonardo Permanent Multipurpose Module, Express Logistics Carrier 4 and Robonaut 2, the first humanoid robot in space. With Europe's ATV-2 and Leonardo; the US Shuttle; Japan's HTV-2; two Russian Soyuz and one Progress docked simultaneously to the ISS, the orbiting laboratory will set a new record for a manned space vehicle - it will provide more than 1000 cubic meters of pressurized volume and will have a total weight of more than 500 tonnes.
Looking forwards to seeing Discovery's final launch!!!
