Europe’s ATV-3 spacecraft to raise space station orbit

Two main engines of European Space Agency’s ATV-3 space freighter will be switched on early on Saturday to readjust the orbit of the International Space Station (ISS), Russian Mission Control said. The engines of the Edoardo Amaldi spacecraft, which is docked at Russia’s Zvezda module on the ISS, will fire at 04.10 a.m. (00:10 GMT) and remain turned on for 377.4 seconds. “As a result, the average height of the ISS orbit will be raised by 1.5 kilometers, to 399.3 km,” the Mission Control said in a statement. The maneuver will be carried out to ensure the best conditions for the landing of Russia’s Soyuz TMA-3M manned spacecraft and the docking of the Soyuz TMA-05M manned spacecraft with the ISS. Soyuz TMA-3M is scheduled to bring back to Earth Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko, ESA astronaut Andre Kuipers and NASA astronaut Don Pettit on July 1. Soyuz TMA-05M will be launched on July 15 to transport three members of the Expedition 32 crew – Russia’s Yuri Malenchenko, NASA’s Sunita Williams, and Japan’s AkihikoHoshide - to the ISS. Corrections to the space station's orbit are conducted periodically to compensate for the Earth's gravity and to safeguard successful docking and undocking of spacecraft.