• Question: how did Rosetta lose power after landing on the comet, even though it it had 10 years in hibernation facing the sun for power to store?

    Asked by viraj to Heather, Helen, Hugh, Julian on 19 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Julian Onions

      Julian Onions answered on 19 Nov 2014:

      Rosetta is still alive and well and fully topped up with power.
      It is the Philae lander that has lost power. It had some batteries on board which get it going for 2 days, and it is/was intended to top up the batteries with solar power.

      Unfortunately it bounced on landing as the devices to fix it to the comet didn’t work, so it ended up quite a distance away from its intended spot. This happens to be in the shadow of a large boulder, so it cant recharge its batteries.

      They attempted to move it a bit, into the sun, and it might get better when it gets nearer the sun. We will have to wait and see if it manages to charge up. However it did do all the main experiments in those two days, so there is lots of useful data arrived.

    • Photo: Helen Johnson

      Helen Johnson answered on 19 Nov 2014:

      Hey Viraj, yep it’s very sad that Philae didn’t land properly. It was supposed to propel a harpoon into the surface of the comet to anchor itself in place, but this didn’t work and as Julian said it bounced about 1km from its intended landing site. It almost shot off back into space! We still got plenty of very useful data send back while it was ‘awake’ though. We now know that there’s organic compounds on 67P!
      Rosetta (the spacecraft that Philae was attached to) is continuing to orbit the comet, and will send back loads more interesting observations. We’ll be able to see for the first time, up close, what happens as a comet approaches the Sun, and Rosetta will analyse the gas that streams off as the comet heats up.

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