MICROMETEORITE PROTECTION OF AN ISS TRANSFER VEHICLE ESA, Europe Circa 2008 Metal 147 × 50 cm Provenance: Swiss Space Museum The European Space Agency is an intergovernmental body uniting 22 countries devoted to space exploration. The ESA's space flight programme includes human spaceflight, the launch and operation of crewless exploration missions to other planets such as Mars and the Moon, Earth observation, science and telecommunication, designing launch vehicles and maintaining a major spaceport, the Guiana Space Centre at Kourou in French Guiana. The agency is also working with NASA to manufacture the Orion spacecraft service module, which flies on the Space Launch System. The Automated Transfer Vehicle, also called an ATV, was an unmanned, non-reusable space freighter of the ESA, which transported supplies such as food, water, equipment, nitrogen, oxygen and fuel to the International Space Station, the ISS. After docking, it was also used for evasive manoeuvres of the space station, to avoid a possible collision with approaching debris and for raising the orbit of the ISS. This is a so-called ‘reboost’ of the space station. At the end of the mission, the ATV was loaded with debris from the space station and burned up in the Earth’s atmosphere after undocking. After the first launch in March 2008, four more flights took place until the end of the programme in February 2015. The micrometeorite protection presented here comes from the ATV test structure manufactured by Contraves Space (later RUAG Space, today named Beyond Gravity) in Switzerland for testing purposes. It was used to protect the vehicles structure from meteorites for example during the ‘reboost’ of the ISS. ------------------------------------------------- MICROMETEORITE PROTECTION OF AN ISS TRANSFER VEHICLE ESA, Europe Circa 2008 Metal 147 × 50 cm Provenance: Swiss Space Museum The European Space Agency is an intergovernmental body uniting 22 countries devoted to space exploration. The ESA's space flight programme includes human spaceflight, the launch and operation of crewless exploration missions to other planets such as Mars and the Moon, Earth observation, science and telecommunication, designing launch vehicles and maintaining a major spaceport, the Guiana Space Centre at Kourou in French Guiana. The agency is also working with NASA to manufacture the Orion spacecraft service module, which flies on the Space Launch System. The Automated Transfer Vehicle, also called an ATV, was an unmanned, non-reusable space freighter of the ESA, which transported supplies such as food, water, equipment, nitrogen, oxygen and fuel to the International Space Station, the ISS. After docking, it was also used for evasive manoeuvres of the space station, to avoid a possible collision with approaching debris and for raising the orbit of the ISS. This is a so-called ‘reboost’ of the space station. At the end of the mission, the ATV was loaded with debris from the space station and burned up in the Earth’s atmosphere after undocking. After the first launch in March 2008, four more flights took place until the end of the programme in February 2015. The micrometeorite protection presented here comes from the ATV test structure manufactured by Contraves Space (later RUAG Space, today named Beyond Gravity) in Switzerland for testing purposes. It was used to protect the vehicles structure from meteorites for example during the ‘reboost’ of the ISS.