14 June 2015. The message came from 500 million kilometers. The robot Philae, which is on the comet 67P, has awakened in the night between Saturday and Sunday. The tiny lander, it is ‘reactivated’ in an unexpected way from hibernation in which he was 6 months and has sent the first data from the comet (67P / Churyumov-Gerasimenko) which had landed in November. This was announced by the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency.
“We can confirm that the Pihlae adventure continues!”, Said the president of the Italian Space, Roberto Battiston. “The awakening of the lander – he added – is great news that, fills us with pride to the reliability of the technologies used, many are Italian brand.”
In November, with an unprecedented effort, the European Space Agency has been able to land a device with a size of a washing machine on a celestial body wide few kilometers in automatic manner. All at a distance of more than 500 million kilometers, after a journey of 10 years and 6 and a half billion kilometers.
Lost connection. Although all three legs of the lander had touched the ground, the harpoons were not open and therefore it went to drifted. But in recent months, mission managers have never stopped looking for the little lander dispersed. The space probe rosette has turned on, from March 12, the communication unit designed to receive messages from the lander.
The hope was that the progressive approach of the comet to the Sun would allow Philae to comes out of his hibernation and resume operation. Finally it happened.
The next bet. Philae is ready to face the second part of his mission, which promises to be even more addictive than the first for the information it can give about primitive objects such as comets. And ‘optimistic the operations manager of Philae to the German space agency DLR, Stephan Ulamec: “the lander now is ready for operations, it has an operating temperature of -35 degrees Celsius and has a total of 24 watts.” From an initial examination it became clear that Philae must have woken up from a little, because in those few seconds submitted comments dated to at least 1.5 days cometary. The data packets now expected by the international team are still more than 8,000.