Philae lander may not have disintegrated as comet passed Sun

In recent months, the increasing solar energy has been warming the comet’s frozen ices – turning them to gas – which pours out into space, dragging dust along with it. The period around perihelion is scientifically very important, as the intensity of the sunlight increases and parts of the comet previously cast in years of darkness are flooded with sunlight.

“There’s no way we can say the lander is dead”, he said.

European probe Rosetta spacecraft has recently captured a brilliant plume of gas and dust erupted from the comet Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

Philae lander and Rosetta satellite are on the brink of following Comet 67P/C-G through perihelion. “On its unique website it will have been too scorching by March or April”.

However, because it bounced and tumbled to a halt on a shadier stretch of the alien surface, it might have been able to witness the dramatic show on the comet as it warmed.

The comet, which is made of ice, minerals and organic particles, has gone into a burst of activity prompted the approaching Sun’s heat.

German Aerospace Centre (DLR) spokeswoman Manuela Braun said while the project experienced disadvantages, there were unexpected advantages.

The European Space Agency (ESA) described the event snapped by its spacecraft’s cameras as “one dramatic outburst event proving so powerful that it even pushed away the incoming solar wind”. The jet, the brightest seen to date, was first recorded in an image taken at 6:24 a.m. PDT (9:24 a.m. EDT, 13:24 GMT) on July 29, but not in an image taken 18 minutes earlier.

However, it is uncertain if Philae will transmit any more information from its perch on the comet.

Philae’s inadvertently protected location raises the tantalising prospect of again waking the lander, if mission scientists can work out a way to contact it (Philae last communicated during July, so scientists have had to cross their fingers and hope it’s received a handful of commands they sent).

“We have the advantage that it (Philae) is really now travelling alive on the comet”. As it prepared for its closest approch to the sun, it could display more such outbursts, astronomers say.

Further complicating communication is the fact that Rosetta has had to move farther away to avoid the confounding effects of the dust storm on its star-tracking navigation system. This distance will be approximately 186 million km from the Earth, which puts it in between the orbits of Earth and Mars.