Twelve years after its maiden flight on ESA‘s ATV-1 “Jules Verne“, our Rendezvous and Docking Sensor (RVS^®) successfully completed its last mission: JAXA’s H-II Transfer Vehicle (HTV) spacecraft, HTV-9 successful berthed to the International Space Station on May 25th, 2020. More information on the mission and a fascinating video can be found here: https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2020/05/h-iib-last-htv-mission-iss/

Overall more than 45 RVS supported resupply missions to the ISS and we sincerely thank all project partners. It was a pleasure to work with you and an honour to participate in such high profile space missions.

Several sensor versions from our next-generation rendezvous and docking sensor family, RVS3000(-3D), have already flown successfully to space. This powerful new sensor continues to serve ISS resupply vehicles, but is also more versatile and will support also other types of missions: debris removal, on-orbit servicing, in-orbit assembly and planetary landing.

This new chapter in the RVS success story has already been started with the successful MEV mission that started to provide life extension services to the Intelsat901 satellite since March 2020, after being guided for docking by our RVS3000-3D sensor.