The European Space Agency (ESA) confirmed Sunday that Rosetta’s lost Philae comet lander is finally awake after seven months of sleep. The spacecraft started sending signals to the ground on June 13, at 10:28 p.m. Central European Summer Time, and lasted 85 seconds.
"Philae is doing very well. It has an operating temperature of -35 C and has 24 watts available," said DLR Philae Project Manager Dr. Stephan Ulamec in a blog post. "The lander is ready for operations."
Another confirmation that Philae is already awake is its tweeted message that said, "Hello Earth! Can you hear me?"
Scientists are now waiting for Philae to communicate with them again. The lander still has more than 8,000 data packets in its mass memory to store more information. The scientists hope that the data will tell them what happened to Philae in the past few days while sitting on the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. They are ready to download the data as soon as Philae talks to them again.
"It's been a long seven months, and, to be quite honest, we weren't sure it would happen—there are a lot of very happy people around Europe at the moment," said Professor Mark McCaughrean, ESA's senior scientific adviser, to the BBC. "I think we're optimistic now that it's awake that we'll have several months of scientific data to pore over."
Philae had been missing since Nov. 12, 2014, after its mother ship, the Rosetta orbiter, dropped it on the comet's surface. It fell on the shady side of the comet, where it couldn't get enough sunlight to power its battery after its initial charge got drained. Even if the Philae is already awake, scientists are still uncertain of its exact location. On Friday, ESA released some processed images of the comet's surface, which they believe provides a clue on the location of the Philae lander.
Scientists are positive that Philae will talk to them again, as the comet nears the sun. The lander would have enough power to wake up and contact Rosetta, according to CNN.
Once fully awake, Philae would continue its experiments on the comet's surface and send real-time information to the ground until mid-August.
