Waiting patiently for Philae

For the past eight days, Rosetta has been sending signals to Philae and listening for a response, but the lander has not yet reported back. This report is provided by the German Aerospace Center, DLR. Perhaps it is still too cold for the Philae lander to wake up on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Maybe its power resources are not yet sufficient to send a signal to the team at the DLR Lander Control Center. On 12 March 2015, the Rosetta orbiter began to send signals to the lander and listen for a response, but Philae has not yet reported back. “It was a very early attempt; we will repeat this process until we receive a response from Philae,” says DLR Project Manager Stephan Ulamec. “We have to be patient.” On 20 March 2015 at 05:00 CET, the communication unit on the Rosetta orbiter was switched off. Now, the DLR team is calculating when the next favourable alignment between the orbiter and the lander will occur, and will then listen again for a signal from Philae. The next chance to receive a signal from the lander is expected to occur during the first half of April. After it landed on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on 12 November 2014, Philae operated continuously for 54 hours; all 10 instruments were used and sent data back to Earth. Then, the lander’s battery was exhausted and Philae went into hibernation at its rather shadowed location. Now, it needs an internal temperature above -45 degrees Celsius and at least five watts of power to automatically turn on. Until it can generate a total of 19 watts, it cannot send signals to Earth via the orbiter. For the months of January and February, the engineers at DLR could definitely rule out the ending of hibernation: “Our simulations clearly showed that Philae […]



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