Astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) have opened the hatch to Europe’s Jules Verne cargo ship and begun converting it into an orbital pantry.

Station commander Peggy Whitson and flight engineers Yuri Malenchenko and Garrett Reisman opened the cargo ship’s hatch at 6:15 a.m. EDT (1015 GMT), about 45 minutes later than planned, and set up an air scrubbing device to clean the space freighter’s atmosphere, NASA spokesperson Josh Byerly told SPACE.com.

The air scrubbing process, a day-long affair, will make Jules Verne habitable for its planned six-month stay at the ISS. Whitson and her crew are expected to officially enter the 32-foot (10-meter) long spacecraft’s 15-foot (4.5-meter) wide pressurized compartment early Saturday and begin unloading its nearly 8 tons of cargo on Monday, NASA has said.

A camera outside the International Space Station caught this view of the arriving European cargo ship Jules Verne during its docking on April 3, 2008. Credit: NASA TV.

Jules Verne, the first of Europe’s new class of Automated Transfer Vehicles (ATV), arrived at the space station early Thursday after a 26-day flight to test its novel video and laser-based guidance system and await the end of NASA’s recent March shuttle mission. The massive, 21-ton spacecraft successfully docked at 10:45 a.m. EDT (1445 GMT) at a port on the aft end of the station’s Russian-built Zvezda service module.

The European Space Agency (ESA) spent about 1.3 billion Euros ($1.9 billion) developing and launching the first ATV spacecraft. It plans to launch at least five, and possibly seven overall, such spacecraft to the space station in return for European astronaut slots on future crews.

Named after the famed 19th century science fiction writer Jules Verne, the inaugural ATV launched late March 8 (ET) atop an Ariane 5 rocket from Europe’s South American spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana.