SpaceX plans to beat that record soon with launches a week apart becoming routine.
These are part of a collection of low-cost (well, lower than a full satellite) Earth observation instruments to take advantage of the external mount points on the ISS. NASA recently had a media briefing about this: http://www.nasa.gov/press/2014/september/nasa-hosts-media-br...
The fact that NASA managed to crash a probe into Mars because they hadn't yet learned the lesson says it all really. Just use SI units and stop worrying about it.
While I love Customary volumes (powers of 2 base units), the rest could stand a change and am glad SpaceX is using Metric.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/ab/Met...
At a distance of 249 m, the ATV computers use videometer and telegoniometer data for final approach and docking manoeuvres. The actual docking to Zvezda is fully automatic. If there are any last-minute problems, a pre-programmed sequence of anti-collision manoeuvres, fully independent of the main navigation system, can be activated by the flight engineers aboard the station.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_Transfer_Vehicle
Or what's that apocryphal story about early astronauts fighting with NASA engineers to put in pilot controls with manual override so these guys could claim to be pilots and not mere passengers? The ugly truth is a lot of this stuff is best left to automation, robots, etc.
Lets say you need a prototype ability tool and die maker machinist on staff to handle "things" during development. And you need a simple piece of threaded rod. You could blow a lot of extra time and money on getting a CNC programmer and the software and a numerically controlled lathe or machining center dropped in to make that boring simple little piece of threaded rod. Or you could say, "dude, I know this is beneath your skill, but you're just sitting there burning oxygen and it'll only take ten minutes for you to machine a piece of threaded rod, so ..."
If you have a tool that's designed to do anything, and the tool and op are just sitting there, even if you could automate a one-off, the overall system cost and productivity is higher if the op just does it by hand.
If you have a VERY active schedule, and maybe 3 simultaneously operating 24x7 arms all over the station with only one dude available to run all the arms and everything at 150% of designed thruput capacity etc, then it would make economic sense to automate this task so the arm op can work on something more human oriented, but ...
Replacing the human with a computer program therefore likely doesn't literally involve verifying that it will not karate chop the station - lower level control will take care of that for you.
However, as anyone who has worked with robot manipulators before, actually getting good performance out of them in variable environments (ie, not a controlled factory assembly line) is quite a bit of work - work that probably isn't worth it.
Even though it might be possible to 'computerize' the control, realistically there's no benefit to doing so.
Plus I have to ask, if a thruster suddenly misfires or goes haywire who is going to be faster? In Apollo days I would put odds on the astronauts, today - I am betting on a computer. We will sooner trust a car to drive itself before we allow a freighter to dock with a space station.
[1]: http://www.space.com/1033-remote-access-canadarm-2-hand-grou...
[2]: http://spaceflightnow.com/falcon9/013/140923arrival/#.VCHgLy...
Do they push it back to earth? Into space, leave it in orbit?
They set Dragon free with the arm, Dragon departs, does a de-orbit burn, jettisons the trunk (with the solar arrays), re-enters the atmosphere and parachutes down into the ocean and is recovered.
[1] http://www.nasa.gov/content/expedition-41-trio-waits-for-dra...
[2] http://www.spaceflight101.com/dragon-spacecraft-information....
