ATV-3 "Edoardo Amaldi "

European Automated Transfer Vehicle

The third Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV-3) from the European Space Agency (ESA) was successfully launched on Mar 23, 2012 from Kourou, French Guiana in South America. The booster that carries the ATV-3 is an Ariane V ES Flight 205.

This third ATV cargo vehicle is named "Edoardo Amaldi " as a tribute to the celebrated Italian physicist and spaceflight pionner. Amaldi started working in nuclear physics with Enrico Fermi, did pionnering work in the field of cosmic rays and in the new field of particle physics, becoming an Italian reference character in nuclear science.

The ATV is an unmanned automatic vehicle that provides pressurized cargo, water, air, nitrogen, oxygen and attitude control propellant. It also removes waste from the station and re-boosts it to a higher altitude to compensate for the atmospheric drag.

For this mission, the ATV-3 has the same thermal blanket configuration as compared to ATV-2. This model is available as a free download on both 1:144 and 1:100 scales. The instruction manual is the same from ATV-1.

Enjoy the photos and the model! The model for this presentation was built by Marcel Kukuricáš, best known as Marcellino4 in the "Papermodelers" forum. He is from Slovakia. Congratulations for this beautiful model.

Model built by Marcellino4 from Slovakia

Similar to ATV-2, the ATV-3 will dock to the Zvezda module

Source: ESA website

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