organization:esa’s rosetta mission

  • #Rosetta safe mode 5 km from #comet
    http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2016/05/30/rosetta-safe-mode-5-km-from-comet

    Over the weekend, #rosetta experienced a ‘safe mode’ event 5 km from the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Contact with the spacecraft has since been recovered and the mission teams are working to resume normal #Operations. “We lost contact with the spacecraft on Saturday evening for nearly 24 hours,” says Patrick Martin, ESA’s Rosetta mission manager. “Preliminary analysis by our flight dynamics team suggests that the star trackers locked on to a false star – that is, they were confused by comet #dust close to the comet, as has been experienced before in the mission.” This led to spacecraft pointing errors, which triggered the safe mode. Unfortunately the star trackers then got hung in a particular sub mode requiring specific action from Earth to recover the spacecraft. “It was an (...)

    #Comets #Estrack/DSN #esoc #estrack #trajectory

    • It was an extremely dramatic weekend,” says Sylvain Lodiot, ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft operations manager.

      After we lost contact, we sent commands ‘in the blind’, which successfully tackled the hung star tracker issue and brought the spacecraft back into three-axis stabilised safe mode, and we now have contact with the spacecraft again. However, we are still trying to confirm the spacecraft’s exact position along its orbit around the comet – we only received images for navigation this morning, the first since Saturday.
      […]
      Operating close to the comet means that the spacecraft is surrounded by a lot of dust. Even though the comet’s activity has diminished significantly since passing through its closest point to the Sun along its orbit last August, the environment is still dusty enough that the star trackers can occasionally mistake comet debris in its field of view for stars.
      […]
      Details of Rosetta’s final descent will be provided soon. The provisional plan is to target the small lobe close to Philae’s original planned landing site at Agilkia, most likely on 30 September.

    • Tchourioumov-Guérassimenko à 1 pixel = 13 cm


      OSIRIS narrow-angle camera image taken in the morning of 28 May 2016 (many hours before the safe mode) when Rosetta was 7.05 km from the centre of Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. The scale is 0.13 m/pixel.
      Credits: ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA

  • Rosetta/Philae outreach team win Sir Arthur Clarke Award
    http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2015/07/17/rosettaphilae-outreach-team-win-sir-arthur-clarke-award

    We are delighted to let you know that the team working on outreach for ESA’s Rosetta mission has been awarded the UK’s Sir Arthur Clarke Award 2015 in the category of “Space Achievement – Education and Outreach.” The Sir Arthur Clarke Awards have been presented annually in the UK since 2005 to recognise and reward notable or outstanding achievements in, or contributions to, all space activities. This year’s awards were announced to an audience of 600 delegates and guests at the UK Space Conference Gala Dinner and Awards in St George’s Hall, Liverpool on Tuesday 14 July 2015 by Rob Douglas, Chairman of the Board of the UK Space Agency, and presented by Dr Helen Sharman, the UK’s first cosmonaut. The Awards are sponsored by the UK Space Agency in collaboration with the British Interplanetary (...)

    #media