It’s been just over a month since the European Space Agency (ESA) gave his farewell to the Philae lander, posatosi in November 2014 on the comet 67P / Churyumov-Gerasimenko and now devoid of energy. In the past few hours, however, it came a real twist: The Rosetta probe, which orbits the comet, was able to locate the robot . Images were acquired on September 2, when the probe was located just 2.7 kilometers from the surface.
Just to put the record straight immediately: Philae is absolutely “dead” and will continue to wander the cosmos rests on the comet, without any chance of recovery. But these images help to fully understand all the difficulties of communication and power that the lander has had since his arrival.
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The submitted photos Rosetta fact show Philae resting on its side , partially collapsed within a crevasse. The robot had been sighted for the last time when he touched the comet’s surface in an area called Agilkia: the landing is not, however, it goes as planned, with the lander that rebounded to reach another area called Abydos, on smaller lobe of the comet.
Given the difficulties for the guidance of its panels toward the Sun, after just three days the energy in the primary battery of Philae has run out : the robot is then entered into hibernation, talking briefly with the Rosetta probe in June and July of 2015, thanks to the rapprochement of the comet to the Sun that allowed in minimum recharge of the batteries. However, beyond the assumptions of what went wrong in the landing, the precise point at which Philae had chased had never been identified until now.
“ With a just one month left of the mission Rosetta , we are very happy to have finally captured Philae and to see him in such incredible detail, “said Cecilia Tubiana of the team responsible for the OSIRIS camera, which was the first to see the images when are started by Rosetta 4 September.
At a distance of 2.7 km the OSIRIS camera has a resolution of about 5 cm per pixel, the more that is sufficient to show the position of Philae, whose main body is one meter wide. “ This remarkable discovery comes at the end of a long and thorough search “, said Patrick Martin, the Rosetta mission manager for the ESA. “We were starting to think that Philae would have been lost forever. It’s amazing to have immortalized this last moment.”
The Rosetta spacecraft has reached the comet 67P / Churyumov-Gerasimenko in August 2014 , after a journey that lasted almost 10 years. A few months later the probe has released the lander to go “to board” the celestial body: Philae did not manage to “harpoon” the ground as expected and it bounced away from its intended place of landing strip.
As mentioned, the last contact between the lander and the probe occurred on July 9 last year . Mission controllers had speculated immediately a slight displacement of the lander, saying how he could be finished on uneven ground. These images allowed us to see how in fact it was precisely the fate of the robot.
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the Rosetta mission is indeed coming to an end : the probe is in fact directed towards the orbit of Jupiter, which means whether it is getting too far from the Sun to receive enough energy for the proper functioning, is that soon the bandwidth required to send to Earth the scientific data collected will not be available.
for this reason, 30 September fact, the probe will be sent to carry out a “no return mission” , during which it will be possible to acquire unpublished data and higher resolution images of all photos ever taken so far by Rosetta’s instruments. Obviously, this will also mean that the orbiter will eventually crash into the comet, continuing a journey begun 12 years ago with his “companion” Philae.
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