Today's CAM (Collision Avoidance Manoeuvre) test went smoothly! At 14:30 CET today, a command to initiate the test was sent up to Jules Verne from the ATV Control Centre (ATV-CC) in Toulouse, France. The test included checking if the back-up functional chains - commanded by the Monitoring Safety Units (MSU 1 & 2; there are two of them) - worked, and they did. ESA's Mission Director Alberto Novelli called in at 17:30 CET this afternoon for a telephone report - listen to the mp3 audio under 'Full story'. -- Daniel

The mission control team are clearly anticipating tomorrow's full CAM demo, set to start Friday morning at 08:57 CET and run several hours. Alberto sounded very confident; nonetheless, knowing that the Russian and NASA partners will be watching everything closely must cause at least a little stress. Here is an mp3 extract of our phone call, and the full article is on the ESA Web portal (link below).

Access mp3 audio here:

"Jules Verne ready to demonstrate critical manoeuvre"