Abstract
Like the heroine of some fairy tale Rosetta awakened and called home on 20 January 2014, after a record 957 days in hibernation. At the speed of light, the signal took 44 minutes and 53 seconds to cross the 807 million km gulf to Earth.
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Notes
- 1.
NASA’s DSN network continued to provide routine tracking and telecommand support for several weeks after Rosetta’s awakening on 20 January, until the Earth distance had decreased to enable ESA’s 35 meter stations at New Norcia, Cebreros and Malargüe to take over. Tracking passes lasting 7 hours were scheduled every day for the first week, then daily 5 hour passes over DSN and ESA stations.
- 2.
A similar computer reboot had occurred midway through the long hibernation, due to a ‘memory leak’ caused by background software processes that continued to run, filling up the buffers.
- 3.
Perihelion occurred at 02:03 UT on 13 August, 186 million km (1.24 AU) from the Sun, between the orbits of Earth and Mars. At that time, the one-way travel time for a signal was 14 minutes 44 seconds.
- 4.
Rosetta was now so far from the Sun that it could not generate enough power from its solar panels to operate all of the instruments simultaneously. MIDAS, COSIMA and VIRTIS were shut down because their potential science return was considered to be lower.
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Bond, P. (2020). Unveiling A Cosmic Iceberg. In: Rosetta: The Remarkable Story of Europe's Comet Explorer. Springer Praxis Books(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60720-3_8
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