Philae in silent mode

The fridge-sized preset lab-grown, which often found comet 67P/Churyumovis thatGerasimenko in November, last made call on July nine and makes to communicate with it again ever missed, professionals contributing on the old European Space Agency venture said.

Comet lander Philae has fallen silent again, raising fears that it may have been moved into a position where its transmissions are being blocked.

This will be the first time a spacecraft and probe have been this close to a comet during its closest approach to the sun.

It was on July 9, when a few problem again occurred since the comet lost the contact with mission scientists. “However, Philae is programmed to switch back and forth between the two transmitters periodically”, wrote the engineers.

Reported by scientists, a fault might have occurred in Philae’s radio equipment and as a result of that it was not able to send back signals.

A command to switch on one of the probe’s scientific instruments, the Rosetta Lander Magnetometer and Plasma Monitor (Romap) was ignored. In any case, it didn’t receive as much sunlight as expected, which meant its solar panels took a while to gather enough power for the mission. It fell on the dark side of the comet and went into deep sleep on the shadow of a crater wall.

Stephan Ulamec, Philae project manager at the DLR German Aerospace Centre said in a statement, “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”.

Mission controllers sent a “blind command” to the lander indicating that it should only use the functional transmitter if the other is faulty.

The comet is now releasing great amounts of gas and dust forcing mission controllers to let the Rosetta orbiter fall back on a safer position at 170 to 190 kilometers away.

“Several times we were afraid that the lander would remain off – but it has repeatedly taught us otherwise”, he added.