Scientists on Friday initiated a last-chance maneuver to contact a long-silent robot lab dropped more than a year ago onto the surface of a comet hurtling through the solar system.
Part of the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission, the Philae probe has yielded spectacular scientific results — and a few moments of high drama — since its near crash-landing onto comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in November 2014.
However, it has been six months since mission control engineers at the German Aerospace Center in Darmstadt have been in communication with Philae and the odds of re-establishing contact are diminishing quickly as the solar-powered probe accelerates away from the sun.
Photo: AFP / ESA MEDIALAB
“The last clear sign of life was received from Philae on July 9, 2015,” the German Space Agency said in a statement. “Since then it has remained silent.”
Scientists sent a command to the refrigerator-sized robot to spin up its flywheel, which was initially used to stabilize the probe on landing.
The hope is that doing so will “shake dust from its solar panels and better align it with the sun,” technical project manager Koen Geurts said.
It is also possible that the command — routed through the Rosetta spacecraft orbiting the comet — will never even reach Philae.
Several further attempts are to be made, he added.
“It’s an admittedly desperate move,” Philippe Gaudon of France’s National Center of Space Research said. “It is very unlikely the robot will become functional again.”
Mission managers say that one of the lander’s two radio transmitters and one of its two receivers have both failed. Even the remaining ones might not be fully functional.
The window of opportunity for making contact with Philae will close definitively toward the end of the month, when the comet and its companion hardware will be about 300 million kilometers from the sun.
That is where the temperature is likely to fall below minus-51oC, the threshold beyond which Philae can no longer operate.
The robot probe — packed with nearly a dozen instruments — landed on 67P after a 10-year, 6.5 billion kilometer journey on the back of its mothership, Rosetta.
It bounced several times on the craggy surface before ending up at an angle in deep shade, where it sent home about 60 hours of data before going into standby mode on Nov. 15, 2014.
The lander’s power pack was recharged as 67P drew closer to the sun on its elliptical orbit and Philae woke up on June 13 last year.
After that, it made intermittent contact, uploading data, only to fall silent again on July 9.
The mission was conceived in a bid to research theories about the origins of life on Earth.
Comets are said to be leftovers from the solar system’s formation.
Some experts say they smashed into the Earth and provided it with water and the chemical building blocks for life.
Philae has found several organic molecules, including four never before detected on a comet.
Other scientists say the accumulations of rocks and ice had their origins on Earth.
Additional reporting by staff writer
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