Engineers monitor the simulation

At Europe’s largest ship hull test facility, 100 km west of Paris, ESA ATV engineers with Astrium ST assistance, here in front of their PC screens, are running numerous simulations of the ATV rendezvous scheduled next year with the ISS. All aspects of the spacecraft for the orbital rendezvous are either represented for real – aft end of the ISS (in the background), sensors, software, trajectories – or simulated such as Jules Verne's inertia, thruster firings.