During the morning, the control managers of the European Space Agency gave final approval for the separation of the Philae lander from Rosetta this morning and its landing on the comet in the afternoon
Update for 13:15 Israel time. About ten minutes ago, at 13:06 Israel time, the mission of landing the spacecraft on the comet passed when Rosetta, which serves as a relay station, transmitted a message that it had received the first signal from the Philae spacecraft. Paolo Perry said from the control room: "We received a signal from the lander and we can follow it and check its speed and direction, we will continue this for the next five hours until it lands.
Update for 11:00 - the separation between the Rosetta spacecraft and the Philae lander, stormy applause in the control room in the hall where the journalists gather in Darmstadt.
9:00 this morning at eight o'clock Central European time (nine Israel time) the final approval was given to perform the separation operations of the Philae lander from the Rosetta spacecraft at nine o'clock (ten Israel time) in preparation for its landing at 17:00 p.m. Central European time (18:00 p.m. Israel time) on Comet 67P Churiomov-Garsimenko. This was announced by the European Space Agency a few minutes ago.
A tense night passed for the engineers of the European Space Agency at the agency's control center in Darmstadt dealing with the maneuvering of the Rosetta spacecraft, in the control room of the Philae lander at the facility of the German space agency DLR in Cologne, and at the scientific instruments and navigation center of the French space agency CNES in Toulouse - the place where the information coming from the lander will be collected and analyzed during the day the near ones
Stefan ULMEC, director of the Philae project at DLR and responsible for its landing on the comet, added that all the commands are in the spacecraft's computer: "The night was very busy in the Rosetta control room here in Darmstadt and in the Philae control center in Cologne. The engineers had to deal with a code glitch, but now everything is fine. "
In a conversation with the science website, Olmak said: "The state of the spacecraft at the moment is GO, and we are going to say goodbye to Rosetta as planned. There is a problem with one of the gas tanks of the Philae landing engines. During the night we discovered that it was not opened. The job of this particular engine is to prevent the spacecraft from bouncing back when landing. We are confident that we will be able to land successfully despite everything."
"The conditions are not easy, we have to land Philae within one kilometer of the planned landing point, and there are formations like large rocks, there are cliffs that could endanger the lander and it could also land on a steep slope and slide."
The scientist: What is the margin of safety you took to make a soft landing?
Olmak: "The lander can easily handle a slope at an angle of 30 degrees, but if there is a steeper slope or if it hits some kind of rock, this may impair its ability to operate."
Paolo Perry, director of the control center of the European Space Agency, said this morning that about half an hour ago (seven thirty in the morning) Rosetta's control managers in Darmstadt began maneuvering the spacecraft to approach the comet so that the separation of Philae would take place at a point relatively close to Comet 67P Churyumov-Garsimenko and immediately after Rosetta will then move away from the comet to an orbit where it will have line of sight with the Philae landing site, so that it can receive its transmissions for several hours after landing.
According to Perry, during the night there were several glitches in the process, and one of the decision points of the night was postponed by an hour.
"We are facing the challenge of flying around a comet for the first time in an unfamiliar environment. We learn to fly in the environment while moving. We need to adapt our mode of activity to the changing conditions (more and more gas and dust are emitted from the comet into the halo and tail of the comet as it gets closer to the Sun and they are already affecting Rosetta and they will affect Philae later in the day. It is very easy to navigate on a planet, we do not know what the strength and concentration of the materials are Hovering around the comet nucleus However, everything is going more smoothly than we expected thanks to the good people who work here.
