Rosetta Probe Awakens, Prepares To Chase Comet

sciencehabit writes "The European comet-chasing probe Rosetta is up and running again today after it successfully roused itself from a 2½-year sleep and signaled anxious controllers on the ground. The spacecraft had been put into hibernation during the most distant part of its 10-year journey in pursuit of comet 67 P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko because sunlight was too dim to keep its solar-powered systems running. Dozing in a slow stabilizing spin, Rosetta could not receive signals from the ground, so there was a risk that some problem might prevent it from responding to its preset alarm call at 10:00 GMT. Even then, there were many processes to go through before news reached Earth: The spacecraft's heaters would need to warm up its systems, its startrackers get a fix, boosters halt the spin, solar arrays turn towards the sun, and, finally, its communications antenna would need to point at Earth. It was not till 18:18 GMT that the signal was picked up by NASA's ground stations at Goldstone, California, and Canberra in Australia, and transmitted to the European Space Agency's (ESA's) control center at Darmstadt in Germany."

Comments

Everything about this mission is a miracle

[Anonymous Coward]

The spacecraft wasn't designed to operate that far out in space and it wasn't designed to handle the comet it's chasing. That anything about the mission is going well at all since they blew their initial launch window and had to retarget is a miracle.

Re:Everything about this mission is a miracle

[Forty Two Tenfold]

...is a miracle.

No. It's a successful exercise at fault tolerance.

Re:Everything about this mission is a miracle

[Last_Available_Usern]

Pffft, not impressed. I ran this same mission in Kerbal Space Program and it was a piece of cake.

Re:Everything about this mission is a miracle

[mbone]

AKA the billion Euro gamble. The Mars flyby was (if a much shorter blackout) considerably more dicey.

Re:Everything about this mission is a miracle

[Metabolife]

You've obviously never written 1000 lines of code and had it just "work" the first time. That's a miracle.

Re:Everything about this mission is a miracle

[cusco]

Yeah, I know, replying to myself. I can't help remembering Voyager's 'Grand Tour' to the outer planets. Congress refused to approve a mission of that extent, instead NASA had to package it as a much shorter mission to Jupiter and Saturn. They (rather sneakily, for a government bureaucracy) launched during the only window that would allow the Grand Tour, and then went after supplemental funding for the supposedly "extended mission" they had planned for all along. Still amazes me that the Shrub White House tried to cancel the miniscule cost of continuing to monitor the spacecraft.

First Glitch

[Freshly Exhumed]

On wakeup an error in the MAKE COFFEE subroutine was discovered that has resulted in Rosetta being a bit grouchy.

Re:First Glitch

[Archangel Michael]

However, Earth based ground crew issued the "MAKE BACON" command which improved the mood.

eh?

[schneidafunk]

Landing on a high-speed small comet versus a giant planet, seems more difficult to me.

Re:eh?

[dpilot]

Speed is relative, so is velocity. Rosetta is going to rendesvous with the comet, and go into orbit around it. At that point the speed and velocity will both be quite slow. I'm guessing that the biggest problem for the lander will be not bouncing off or floating away - there's next to no gravity.

Re:eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Both targets will be/were travelling at close to relatively zero at landing time.

That's how I would design a lander too.

The Path of Rosetta since launch

[idji]

Here is a beautiful interactive 3D simulation of how Rosetta got to where it is now. Where is Rosetta?. Video
The choreography of the Earth, Mars, Earth, Earth slingshots is just amazing.
Here is the complex orbits to come of Rosetta around the comet Orbit around Comet