‘A European robot freighter decoupled from the International Space Station (ISS), positioning itself for a fiery, suicide descent into Earth’s atmosphere,’ the European Space Agency announced Saturday. 

‘The Automated Trasfer Vehicle (ATV) is expected to burn up in the upper atmosphere over a “completely uninhabited” area of the Pacific on September 29,’ ESA said.

The ATV – called Jules Verne, after the 19th-century French sci-fi pioneer - was used to bring ‘7.5 tonnes of equipment, water and air to the ISS crew on its maiden flight in April. It has been used as a temporary leisure centre and sleeping area over the past five months.’

ISS’ crew,  Sergei Volkov, Oleg Kononenko and Greg Chamitoff, will sorely miss the ATV. French astronaut Jean-Francois Clervoy, who advised ESA on how the freighter could be turned to human use said it had become “one of the best places for the crew to live.”

“Even though our schedule has been very busy at the ATV Control Centre, I couldn’t have wished for a better mission,” said Herve Come, ESA’s ATV lead mission director added.

Programmed destruction will take place at night ‘so that scientists can gain an insight into how large objects behave when they return to Earth.’ NASA, the American National Aeronautics and Space Administration, will monitor the destruction with two aircraft laden with radar, ultra-violet and other sensors.

And so ESA continues to profile itself in space. It took the European Space Agency a couple of years to develop the technology, know-how and experience to add something to international space exploration but now, in 2008, it is finally playing an important role of our understanding of the universe.

Yesterday it was announced that the space craft Rosetta has embarked on a historical and groundbreaking trip to Steins, an unusually-shaped asteroid. Rosetta will collect date and images about the asteroid and send them to earth where they will be collected. At this moment, one can see a video of the latest images of Steins Rosetta sent to ESA at its website. The image to the right is one of those Rosetta sent only hours ago.

“Steins looks like a diamond in the sky,” said Uwe Keller, Principal Investigator for the OSIRIS imaging system from the Max Planck Institut Fuer Sonnensystemforschung, Lindau.

The images clearly show several small craters on the asteroid, two of which huge ones. One of the big ones is two kilometers diameter which indicates that Steins must be very old.

Rita Schulz, Rosetta Project Scientist, explained, “In the images is a chain of impact craters, which must have formed from recurring impact as the asteroid rotated. The impact may have been caused by a meteoroid stream, or fragments from a shattered small body.”

‘The chain is composed of about 7 craters. To determine the age of the asteroid, a count of the craters on the asteroid’s surface has been started (the more the number of craters, the older the asteroid). So far, 23 craters have been spotted,’ ESA explains on its website.

ESA’s scientists will use the image to find out why Steins is so unusually bright.  The images may also enable them to understand how asteroids are formed.