Rosetta wakes up to prepare for its date with comet

Rosetta, launched in 2004 and made possible with significant input from British industry and academia, is in pursuit of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, where it will become the first space mission to attempt a landing on a comet’s surface, and the first to follow a comet as it swings around the Sun.

The signal, received yesterday January 20, 2014 by NASA’s Goldstone and Canberra ground stations at 18:18 GMT/19:18 CET, was confirmed by ESA’s space operations centre in Darmstadt.

Operating on solar energy, the Rosetta comet chaser was placed into a deep space ‘slumber’ in June 2011 as it cruised out to a distance of nearly 800 million kilometres from the Sun, beyond to the orbit of Jupiter.

According to a statement, Rosetta’s orbit has brought it back to within 673 million kilometres from the Sun, where there is enough solar energy to fully power the spacecraft

Still approximately nine million kilometres from the comet, Rosetta was reactivated by its pre-programmed internal ‘alarm clock’. After warming up its key navigation instruments, coming out of a stabilising spin, and aiming its main radio antenna at Earth, Rosetta sent a signal to let mission operators know it had survived the most distant part of its journey.