No signals heard from comet lander Saturday
Source: AP-EXCITE
By KIRSTEN GRIESHABER
BERLIN (AP) — The European Space Agency received no signals from the Philae lander Saturday morning during a scheduled effort to establish communication, the mission chief said.
Paolo Ferri, ESA's head of mission operations, told The Associated Press, that the Rosetta orbiter did not get any signals from the lander on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
ESA on Friday ordered a rotating operation to pull the lander out of a shadow so that solar panels could recharge the depleted batteries.
Even if that operation was successful, it may take days or weeks until the batteries of Philae are strong enough to send signals again.
FULL story at link.
Graphic shows Europe's unmanned Rosetta probe.; 2c x 4 inches; 96.3 mm x 101 mm;
Read more: http://apnews.excite.com/article/20141115/sci--comet_landing-6eb7f8af5e.html
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orbiter lag.
“We are almost on Pluto’s doorstep!”
“The final hibernation wake up Dec. 6 signifies the end of an historic cruise across the entirety of our planetary system”
“New Horizons is healthy and cruising quietly through deep space – nearly three billion miles from home – but its rest is nearly over,” says Alice Bowman, New Horizons mission operations manager at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md. “It’s time for New Horizons to wake up, get to work, and start making history.”
Since launching in January 2006, New Horizons has spent 1,873 days in hibernation – about two-thirds of its flight time – spread over 18 separate hibernation periods from mid-2007 to late 2014 that ranged from 36 days to 202 days long.
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/news_center/news/20141113.php
