The European Space Agency's Georges Lemaître, the automated transfer vehicle named after the 'Father of the Big Bang', is scheduled to launch late today from French Guiana.
The ATV-5 will carry the largest payload of supplies and equipment to the International Space Station of any vehicle in the series. It will dock with the ISS and remain linked to the station for several months, during which time the space station crew will transfer the equipment--and then offload waste material from the station.
According to the official ESA release: "The last ATV in the series is carrying nearly 6.6 tons of supplies to the Station. While ATV Georges Lemaître will carry a record amount of around 2620 kg of dry cargo, this time there is less propellant for reboosting the Station. For the first time, the space freighter’s three water tanks are fully loaded, totalling 850 litres."
Equipment for science research includes units for the Electromagnetic Levitator, a facility that allows "melting and solidifying metals as they float freely thanks to weightlessness in space."
In addition, the Lemaître could help develop tools for a potential future rendezvous with free-falling objects such as space debris or an asteroid. "The spacecraft will serve as a test-bed for a suite of optical-sensor prototypes to home in on targets, based on a long-range infrared camera and a short-range 3D imaging sensor."
At the end of its mission, the Lemaître will then detach and assume a carefully programmed destructive re-entry, which will see it burn up in the atmosphere over the southern Pacific. But even at this phase, it will be transmitting data potentially useful for the ISS's own eventual date with destiny.
The scientist for whom the Lemaître is named has long been one of my heroes. (Kindle edition of my book is here.) Indeed, one could argue that his role in the history of the Big Bang should be more of a footnote to his other achievements.
Between the 1920s and end of the 1930s, there was not a single area of relativistic cosmology Lemaître was not involved in, pioneering key models in relativistic cosmology, including investigations related to black holes, the expansion of the universe and the cosmological constant.
For example, Lemaître was virtually alone in believing that the cosmological constant was a real component of the universe's expansion, not just a 'fudge' factor added by Einstein in the early days to his field equations, to 'balance' an otherwise static universe. And it was this component that could cause expansion to accelerate in Lemaître's view.
While Lemaître did not live long enough to see confirmation of this aspect of cosmic expansion (he died in 1966), he did live to see a major confirmation of the Big Bang in the discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation by Penzias and Wilson in 1965.
Here's a recent video produced by the ESA with the cooperation of the Archives Georges Lemaître at Catholic University of Louvain.
The video features commentary by Dominique Lambert, professor at the University of Namur in Belgium and the author of Un Atom d'Universe, the first and most detailed biography of Lemaître.
The video is good, but it does suffer from a few gaffes.
For example, the opening commentary at the beginning refers to Lemaître as "... a Belgian priest and professor from the University of Leuven ..."
But as one of the advisors at the Archives pointed out to me, "Lemaître was a professor at the Faculty of sciences of the Université catholique de Louvain, which at the time was the French-speaking part of the so-called unitary University, Université catholique de Louvain with even the name "Louvain" in french, and not that of the city of Leuven."
To English and American readers, this may sound like nitpicking, but in Lemaître's day, you could get a rock through the window if you expressed a marked preference for speaking and teaching in French.
"Lemaître never taught in Dutch, and was never a member of the Dutch section of the University of Leuven. The Dutch section became the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven or University of Leuven as it is designated today in English (as in the video)."
For the duration of his academic career (1920s--1960s), he was a member only of what is now the Université catholique de Louvain in Louvain-la-Neuve. "And it is precisely in the Université catholique de Louvain," I'm told, "that are conserved the Archives Georges Lemaître bequeathed by the priest's family. In Louvain-la-Neuve there stands an exhibition on the Universe, where video was filmed."
While it's a nice acknowledgement to Lemaître's legacy for the ATV-5 to be named after him, I'm hoping some day a new space or moon based telescope will be named for the Belgian priest-physicist, a real research device in line with his areas of interest and achievements.
The ATV-5 launch can be followed live on their blog.
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