The ship Edoardo Amaldi pushes ISS into a new orbit

European ATV-3 unmanned space transport ship helped lift the orbit of the International Space Station (ISS) by 1.7km, according to RIA Novosti.

>>>Europe launches Edoardo Amaldi onto the space station

The two main engines of the ATV-3 began to start at 4:54 am on April 1 to push the ISS into a new orbit at an altitude of 389.8km, an increase of 1.7km of height. old place.

There are six astronauts working on ISS

It is known that ATV-3 is the third automatic transport ship of the European Space Agency (ESA) named after 20th-century Italian physicist Edoardo Amaldi, bringing 6.6 tons of cargo including fuel , drinking water, oxygen, food . to provide for ISS.

The ship arrived to assemble with the port of the Zvezda logistic module at 5:30 am on March 29 (Vietnam time), after being launched into space using Ariane 5 rocket from Kourou space airport in Guiana. French colonial day March 23.

Reportedly, before the ship Edoardo Amaldi, two other transport ships were also launched by ISA, the ATV-1, Jules Verne, launched on March 9, 2008 and the ATV-2 named Johannes Kepler, launched on February 16, 2011.

In addition to the mission of supplying cargo to the space station and taking away waste, the European ATV fleet also performs another important task to help push the station to a higher orbit by means of the ship.

The increase in orbit for ISS was carried out regularly to help this $ 100 billion space station compensate for the loss of altitude due to the gravity of the earth, as well as to facilitate ISS to connect with ships. Space.

Currently ISS is presenting six astronauts from the 30th ISS international fleet with the commander, 50-year-old American astronaut Dan Burbank.

The remaining astronauts include Donald Pettit (USA), Oleg Kononenko, Anton Shkaplerov, Anatoly Ivanishin (the same of Russia) and Andre Kuipers (Netherlands).