Rosetta Lander - After seven years of cruise, prepared for hibernation

Abstract

Rosetta is a Cornerstone Mission of the ESA Horizon 2000 programme. It is going to rendezvous with comet 67P/ Churyumov–Gerasimenko after a 10 year cruise and will study both its nucleus and coma with an orbiting spacecraft and a landed platform. The latter, named Philae, has been designed to land softly on the comet nucleus and is equipped with 10 scientific instruments to perform in-situ studies of the cometary material. Philae has been provided by a large international consortium. Rosetta was successfully launched on March 2, 2004 from Kourou in French Guyana. Philae is operated by the Lander Control Centre (LCC) at DLR, Cologne and the Science Operations and Navigation Centre (SONC) at CNES, Toulouse via the European Spacecraft Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt. The scientific lead is at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Science (Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany) and the Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale (Paris). Since launch, the Lander has been operational during commissioning, several checkouts, two planetary swing-bys at the Earth and one at Mars, fly-bys at asteroids Sˇ teins and Lutetia as well as some additional activities for calibration and failure investigation. Payload checkout PC13 was the last Lander activation prior to a deep space hibernation phase of Rosetta, which started in June 2011 and will last until approaching the comet in 2014. The paper describes the various Lander activities over the past seven years and gives an outlook of near- and on-comet operations. Landing is foreseen in November 2014 at a heliocentric distance of 3 AU. Prior to that, detailed characterization of the comet nucleus has to be performed with the Rosetta Orbiter instruments.