'Jules Verne' set for sea voyage

The Jules Verne cargo ship has been packed up ready for despatch to the European spaceport in French Guiana.
The vehicle - the biggest, most complex spacecraft ever built in Europe - will launch in January with up to 7.5 tonnes of supplies for the space station.
Late on Friday it began the transfer by road and canal to Rotterdam, from where it will go by sea to South America.
The Jules Verne - or Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) to give it its generic name - has been split into three parts and put in containers for the journey. The craft heads to the Kourou spaceport as part of a 400-tonne, 50-case shipment that incorporates all the associated parts, apparatus and tools needed to reassemble it and check it prior to launch.
Test programme
The Jules Verne is the first of at least five ATVs that will fly to the International Space Station (ISS) over the coming years.
It will also reboost the station, which has a tendency to drift back to Earth over time. Esa's research and technology centre, Estec, in Noordwijk has put the space ship through an exhaustive series of tests.
The ATV was placed in an acoustic chamber and blasted with sound to ensure it could withstand the noise and vibration of launch; and in a giant vacuum chamber to see that components would function properly in the extreme conditions of the space environment.
"This is like if you had an old car with the radio on and then you switched the windscreen wipers on, you used to get noise on the radio," explained John Ellwood Esa's ATV Project Manager. "We cannot let that happen with the ATV."
The Jules Verne is scheduled to set sail from Rotterdam on Tuesday onboard the French cargo ship MN Toucan. It will take about 11 days to cross the Atlantic Ocean.
Once in Kourou, an 18-week launch preparation campaign will begin. The ATV will be put back together, fuelled and loaded with its dry and wet cargoes. Finally, it will be placed atop its Ariane 5-ES launcher.