Alarm clock set to ‘wake up’ comet-chaser probe Rosetta
22 Jan 2014 4:56 AM IST
Rosetta’s onboard computer was programmed to give the wakeup call at 1000 GMT, but it would take at least seven hours for mission control to get confirmation it has worked, they said.
The craft was launched in 2004 on a trek of seven billion kilometres around the inner Solar System.
Its goal is to rendezvous in August with a comet, 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, and in November send down a lander to carry out experiments on the icy wanderer.
Comets are clusters of ice and dust which are believed to be remnants from the very birth of our star system.
Analysing this primeval matter should unlock secrets of how the Solar System formed and possibly how life on Earth was kickstarted.
Alvaro Gimenez Canete, the European Space Agency’s director of science and robotic exploration, referred to the carved stone that in the early 19th century unlocked Egyptian hieroglyphics and revealed the life of the Pharaohs.
‘Rosetta and the comet 67/P may become the Rosetta Stone for planetary science,’ he said.
Rosetta was placed in hibernation for 31 months because it was so far from the Sun that light was too dim to power its solar array.
The wakeup procedure should take a number of hours, followed by a tiny ‘all is well’ signal, which will take 45 minutes to cross a distance of more than 800 million km (500 million miles).
‘The window in which we expect the nominal signal, if everything goes according to plan, is of about an hour, between 1730 and 1830 GMT,’ Paolo Ferri, ESA’s head of solar and planetary missions, said over phone from mission control in Darmstadt, Germany.
The craft was launched in 2004 on a trek of seven billion kilometres around the inner Solar System.
Its goal is to rendezvous in August with a comet, 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, and in November send down a lander to carry out experiments on the icy wanderer.
Comets are clusters of ice and dust which are believed to be remnants from the very birth of our star system.
Analysing this primeval matter should unlock secrets of how the Solar System formed and possibly how life on Earth was kickstarted.
Alvaro Gimenez Canete, the European Space Agency’s director of science and robotic exploration, referred to the carved stone that in the early 19th century unlocked Egyptian hieroglyphics and revealed the life of the Pharaohs.
‘Rosetta and the comet 67/P may become the Rosetta Stone for planetary science,’ he said.
Rosetta was placed in hibernation for 31 months because it was so far from the Sun that light was too dim to power its solar array.
The wakeup procedure should take a number of hours, followed by a tiny ‘all is well’ signal, which will take 45 minutes to cross a distance of more than 800 million km (500 million miles).
‘The window in which we expect the nominal signal, if everything goes according to plan, is of about an hour, between 1730 and 1830 GMT,’ Paolo Ferri, ESA’s head of solar and planetary missions, said over phone from mission control in Darmstadt, Germany.
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