Philae space probe loses contact with ground control | News | DW.COM

Shortly afterwards the craft went into hibernation but recently woke up again after its batteries were charged as the comet got closer to the Sun.

BERLIN The Philae comet lander has murdered discrete, European scientists said on Monday, bringing up uncertainties which typically it has moved again on their advance a lot of distances from Earth.

Communications have been frustratingly intermittent, and the last signal the Rosetta mothership received from the surface was on July 9. Rosetta, the satellite that dropped Philae onto Comet 67/P-G, is currently orbiting the lander in attempts to find its whereabouts and open a reliable line of communication.

Earlier this month the Philae lander had been able to communicate with Rosetta, but connections have been sporadic and incomplete. The key thing is that we have not had the lander in a science operable situation up to now, so the lander team is looking at modifying things onboard the lander to try to enable operations, given the non-nominal situation we are in.

After waking up in June, Philae has made a few contact with ground control, but maintaining contact has been hard. Should the idea work, it would start to conduct scientific measurements and then send the data to Earth as soon as Philae switches it on. One is the slight shift of Philae’s position, possibly triggered by a gas emission from the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which affected its antenna.

On a positive note, scientists are amazed that Philae is still fighting for its life and is trying to reach them from time to time.

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The profile of how strongly the sun is falling on which panels has changed from June to July, and this does not seem to be explained by the course of the seasons on the comet alone”,

said Stephan Ulamec, Philae project manager at the German Aerospace Center (DLR). It was already clearly sitting on uneven terrain, as was evident from the panoramic image it took of its surroundings after landing. But in the last week the dust coming off the comet has obscured the star trackers used by the ESA team to navigate safely.

Mission controllers have sent a “blind command” to the probe telling it to use only the functional transmitter if one of them is faulty.