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Posted by: climber Jun 14 2015, 11:05 AM

Got the info from a Radio that CNES get a 2mn contact with Philae last nigth and 40 second of data.
Please take this info with due precautions waiting for confirmation before opening a new topic.

http://tempsreel.nouvelobs.com/en-direct/a-chaud/3681-philae-repond-nouveau-selon-centre-etudes-spatiales.html

Posted by: CAP-Team Jun 14 2015, 11:12 AM

Wow that would be awesome. Got goosebumps

Posted by: climber Jun 14 2015, 11:29 AM

More radios confirm the information. Welcome back Philae

Posted by: JTN Jun 14 2015, 11:31 AM

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-33126885, so it must be true. (Not much info in that article yet)

Posted by: machi Jun 14 2015, 11:36 AM

It looks that https://twitter.com/Philae2014 account is now active.
New message: "Hello Earth! Can you hear me?"

Posted by: Habukaz Jun 14 2015, 11:37 AM

The account https://twitter.com/Philae2014/status/610047412036595712 and it's on the http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2015/06/14/rosettas-lander-philae-wakes-up-from-hibernation/:

Awesome news.

Posted by: doekia Jun 14 2015, 11:54 AM

Philae is up !!!
Amazed and exited.

What an awesome adventure!

Posted by: Paolo Jun 14 2015, 11:55 AM

at last "my" SD2 will get the opportunity to do something meaningful. way to go!

Posted by: xflare Jun 14 2015, 12:20 PM

#Philae is number one trending topic in the UK right now !!

Posted by: climber Jun 14 2015, 12:40 PM

Seams that it was awake since a few days already.

Posted by: Mercure Jun 14 2015, 01:01 PM

What a comeback! - After other missions hoping for calls that never came....

Posted by: DoF Jun 14 2015, 01:34 PM

That's some great news! Hopefully all the instruments are in working order and the battery as well. With an internal temperature at -35°C it also seems like there is quite a reasonable margin from the wake-up limit at -45°C.

Posted by: Harder Jun 14 2015, 01:50 PM

The backlog of data packets also gives some confidence that the lander is regularly awake and capable to continue its unique mission. Maybe this will trigger a change in the Rosetta-comet geometry to maximize interaction with Philae?

Posted by: fredk Jun 14 2015, 02:33 PM

The BBC put it well - this is one of the most astonishing moments in the history of space exploration. I was not optimistic - so many things could have gone wrong! Looks like we're in for a heck of a ride...

Posted by: scalbers Jun 14 2015, 02:39 PM

Pretty amazing and great news. Will be interesting to see if the temperature can keep rising above -35C. The sun should have passed the "overhead" point in May, so it's starting to get slightly lower in the south and maybe away from the top panel. Yet it is getting more intense with the approach to perihelion.

Posted by: 0101Morpheus Jun 14 2015, 02:42 PM

This accomplishment is on par with landing Shoemaker on Eros for me.

Posted by: Ron Hobbs Jun 14 2015, 03:08 PM

ESA scientist Mark McCaughrean told the BBC: "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."

Quote from the BBC: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-33126885

Posted by: scalbers Jun 14 2015, 03:29 PM

Judging from this http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/14/world/philae-comet-lander-found/index.html, the 24 watts we heard represents a good power margin. "Months after Philae nodded off, lander system engineer Laurence O'Rourke told CNN that Philae needed almost 6 watts of power to reboot itself, 9 watts to accept communications and 19 watts to allow two-way communication with the orbiter."

I would infer it could have rebooted and been receiving commands for a long time.

Posted by: Paolo Jun 14 2015, 03:53 PM

I don't know what to make of it. http://www.ilpost.it/2015/06/14/philae-svegliato/ (one of the few which is known for fact checking and reliability) is reporting words from one of the engineers responsible for Philae (for SD2, I suppose) that the lander "was not where we were looking for it"

Posted by: Gerald Jun 14 2015, 04:08 PM

That's supergreat news! 24 W sounds very good. Might even be sufficient to load the battery later, near perihelion.
I hope, the instruments survived the deep temperatures. Can't wait for more data about the health of all systems.

Posted by: vikingmars Jun 14 2015, 04:30 PM

Thanks a lot Climber.
CNES (Marc Pircher, CNES Director at Toulouse Flight Center) added this afternoon that those 1st 40 sec of data was the one that Philae has still in its memory and that was planned to be downloaded.
The downloading will take no less than 10 days to be completed.
Then and only then, they will be able to send commands to Philae for new instructions.
They added that they will try to move it somewhat in order that it is able to sample the surface of 67-P, BUT they will have to be very careful in instructing it to move because in its current position one of its leg is still oriented upwards with no contact on the surface of 67-P and they don't want it to tilt over because this would ruin its mission...

Posted by: anticitizen2 Jun 14 2015, 04:30 PM

To add to this- https://twitter.com/FrancescoTop/status/610055746164801536 who was involved during the FSS (and possibly beyond, not sure of his position)

"So, it seems now we have a rover on the comet, not a lander."

Posted by: centsworth_II Jun 14 2015, 04:31 PM

Maybe referring to the fact that the recent possible image of the lander was outside of the landing ellipse. If that indeed turns out to be Philae.

Oh, yeah, and Woo Hoo!!!

Posted by: SFJCody Jun 14 2015, 05:15 PM

http://www.nature.com/news/philae-comet-lander-wakes-up-and-phones-home-1.17756?WT.mc_id=TWT_NatureNews

Could it be trapped in some kind of narrow crevasse?
I wonder whether crevasse or crevice is most appropriate? Guess it depends on the ratio of ice/rock!

Posted by: scalbers Jun 14 2015, 05:26 PM

Yes this is possible, and in the shorter term Rosetta will be pointing more directly at Philae as mentioned near the bottom of http://www.nature.com/news/philae-comet-lander-wakes-up-and-phones-home-1.17756?WT.mc_id=TWT_NatureNews.

Posted by: Habukaz Jun 14 2015, 05:36 PM

More images soon? I like the sound of that.

Posted by: Explorer1 Jun 14 2015, 05:44 PM

Fantastic news to wake up to! It should be pretty trivial to nail down a final location, right? (i.e. confirming the object in the images is our trusty friend).

Posted by: vikingmars Jun 14 2015, 05:53 PM

As CNES said today, no taking of new images in the coming days :
http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?s=&showtopic=7896&view=findpost&p=221280

Posted by: Habukaz Jun 14 2015, 05:57 PM

Yes, I read that. The order and priority of things is what interested me.

Posted by: Harder Jun 14 2015, 06:22 PM

Vikingmars, did you perhaps watch the 20:00 TF1 news? Monsieur Le Gall was announced but I can't pick up TF1 to hear what he has to say, so much for my "TripleSat" antenna dish!

Posted by: scalbers Jun 14 2015, 06:33 PM

Here is a TF1 news story, with a different interview?

http://lci.tf1.fr/science/nouvelles-technologies/philae-s-est-reveille-et-maintenant-8621490.html

Posted by: Harder Jun 14 2015, 06:53 PM

Thanks for the link to the news item, this is probably what was referred to! Earlier I read the CNES website, where it was mentioned that Mr. le Gall was invited for the TF1 news. I thought that if there was going to be any news about a next contact with Philae, then this would be a good PR moment with the CNES director himself on TV.

Posted by: neo56 Jun 14 2015, 07:01 PM

I watched TF1 news with Mr Le Gall interview but he said nothing more than what was previously announced on the ESA website.

Posted by: brellis Jun 14 2015, 07:21 PM

Great news! What discoveries are yet to come, and will we learn more about Philae's adventures on the surface in these intervening months? Did it get bumped around by an outgassing or some surface rumbling? Did it move from where they thought it was when the batteries ran out to a place that gets more sun light? *gets popcorn ready*

Confidence was expressed by the mission team that it could reboot as it has; I had wondered if it could survive another orbit and get rebooted 6.5 years from now. Chances of that seem very slim based on this from the BBC article:

Posted by: nprev Jun 14 2015, 07:52 PM

Very exciting news indeed, and a triumph for the mission engineers.

Remember that despite the initial good news I'm sure that there will be several days (at least) of checkout activity, and Philae is in what is arguably the most dynamic surface environment ever experienced by a lander. Let's root for the team and be grateful for every bit we get.

Posted by: deglr6328 Jun 14 2015, 08:36 PM

Wow, this site still exists....and I somehow even remembered my password after I don't know how many years!

Anywhats, I heard a scientist interviewed on the BBC who said the first priority of the mission would be to drill another comet sample and analyze it!?! Is this REALLY the case? Obviously they need to do a lot of work waking individual instruments back up and transferring old accumulated data, but even then is it possible to repeat the sampling experiment at all? I was under the impression that the COSAC instrument exhausted its helium carrier gas for the GS/MS and maybe some other consumables during the first attempt in the initial battery powered 60hr science window. Can anyone inform further?

Posted by: katodomo Jun 14 2015, 09:48 PM

Only one oven for COSAC was filled (or supposed to be filled) by SD2 as far as I know. Since the system is built for multiple (26) runs I would assume that the helium regulator with its two tanks doesn't just fully open its valve on the first sample and let it run till dry. Even then a drilled sample could still at least be evaluated under the CIVA MI spectroscopic microscope.

Since the SD2 and Ptolemy/COSAC require quite a bit of power drilling won't be on any priority list though.

Posted by: MahFL Jun 14 2015, 10:11 PM

I think they concluded no solid sample got into the oven, and it was gas that was analyzed.

Posted by: vikingmars Jun 14 2015, 10:13 PM

In fact, nothing new : just PR from Mr Le Gall...
The REAL news about Philae are always coming from CNES' Toulouse Space Center, so stay tuned !

Posted by: ZLD Jun 14 2015, 10:24 PM

Wonderful news!

I think this is probably one of the most interesting times in planetary exploration with the broadest spectrum of missions occurring. Two dwarf planets with Dawn at Ceres and New Horizons at Pluto, a long term comet orbiter with Rosetta, a resurrected comet lander with Philae, a (possibly) resurrected Venus orbiter with Akatsuki, tons of data streaming back from Mars and Saturn, next year Jupiter. Truly the crème de la crème of engineering feats in recent times.

Posted by: Harder Jun 15 2015, 07:53 AM

this morning the CNES director Mr Le Gall reported on France 2 that Philae is fully awake and that a second contact was established, lasting several tens of minutes.

Posted by: climber Jun 15 2015, 08:16 AM

Some planning info that were set up before first contact (in french) : https://rosetta.cnes.fr/fr/le-sonc-prepare-le-reveil-de-philae

They plan direct science without using batteries so they'll start with the less power dependent instruments: ROMAP SESAME CIVA & ROLIS.
Plans will certainly change regarding actual situation but I'll bet for pictures been taken pretty soon since knowing Philae environment will considerably help planning.

Posted by: climber Jun 15 2015, 08:26 AM

It looks like MUPUS would be first on the list: https://twitter.com/philae_mupus/status/610356676202491904

Posted by: Herobrine Jun 15 2015, 02:48 PM

http://isee3.p3s.nl/philae/ has started displaying new data. So far, it looks like it's just the Rosetta systems (ESS, MSS) with actual data.

Posted by: stone Jun 15 2015, 03:26 PM

COSAC has a very nice gas dosing system and it has not used much of its helium yet. So if there was no major problem during the very cold time on the comet it is likely to work again. With the active comet the COSAC and Ptolemy mass spectra will be a lot of fun to look at.

There is no house keeping data from the instruments yet, so it is a little bit early to speculate which one will be the first to be switched on.

For me the wonder is that Philae survived the 100°C below zero and is still working.

Thanks for the support!

One of the COSAC team.

Posted by: climber Jun 15 2015, 04:02 PM

DLR says that Philae get at least 3 hours of sunlight per comet day instead of 1.3 expected. This is nearly 50% of the possible max instead of 20%, right? Not bad at all on this regard.

Posted by: TheAnt Jun 15 2015, 04:12 PM

Absolutely amazing, Philae jumps out of the shadows and now is a busy bee! http://isee3.p3s.nl/philae/

Posted by: fredk Jun 15 2015, 04:16 PM

It's not clear exactly what the duration of the second contact was - http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-33135603 reports that

Posted by: jgoldader Jun 15 2015, 05:01 PM

But, SD2 wasn't able to sample the surface the first time, correct? IIRC, because of Philae's orientation, it couldn't reach the surface. Is there reason to hope for a different outcome now?

(That said, I'm very pleased to hear Philae's back in action, and hoping for some more images at the very least.)

Posted by: Bill Harris Jun 15 2015, 05:06 PM

I am particularly looking forward to the CONSERT data...

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/experimentDisplay.do?id=2004-006C-08

--Bill

Posted by: Harder Jun 15 2015, 06:04 PM

Fredk, you are right - the weight of twitter-evidence today points at seconds, rather than minutes, of connect time. Perhaps he meant the time of the total comm session incl. listening in when he mentioned "minutes".
Anyway, I posted a comment to the Philae awake blog post from ESA, respectfully asking for a daily status update. Even "no news today" would be most welcome to contain my excitement and interest for a next 24 hrs!

Posted by: stone Jun 15 2015, 06:38 PM

This is a good update, in German, sorry.

http://www.dw.de/rosetta-muss-ihre-antennen-jetzt-genau-auf-philae-ausrichten/a-18518860

Posted by: Paolo Jun 15 2015, 06:58 PM

and an update from DLR in English
http://www.dlr.de/dlr/en/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-10081/151_read-13918/#/gallery/16734

Posted by: climber Jun 15 2015, 07:48 PM

More news from ESA here: http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Operations/Philae_wake-up_triggers_intense_planning

Posted by: climber Jun 16 2015, 07:03 AM

The kind of stories we all love to read here: http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2015/06/15/how-we-heard-from-philae/

Posted by: cIclops Jun 16 2015, 08:20 AM

Looks like real Philae data. According to the ESA Rosetta glossary ESS refers to the Electrical Support System of the lander. It's temperature value was updated 16.06.2015 07:37:30 and shows an increase to 21.43 °C.

Posted by: fredk Jun 16 2015, 01:45 PM

From the ftp://ftp.irit.fr/IRIT/CSC/4218.pdf:

Posted by: 4throck Jun 16 2015, 04:15 PM

Just look at the top image on:
http://isee3.p3s.nl/philae/

The system locations are indicated on Roseta and Philae.

Posted by: ollopa Jun 16 2015, 04:23 PM

The webmaster at http://isee3.p3s.nl/philae/ confirms that these are old data. Notice the other readings, which relate to pre-delivery status. S/he says: "....I've been meaning to update....."

Posted by: climber Jun 16 2015, 05:38 PM

Rosetta blog: http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2015/06/16/preparing_rosetta_to_listen/
I would expect science from the surface as early as next week when Rosetta will reach the right "orbit".

Posted by: pac56 Jun 16 2015, 07:07 PM

Interview with Philippe Gaudon, project head at CNES about first re-contact with Philae (in french):

https://rosetta.cnes.fr/fr/jai-eu-la-chance-de-voir-le-reveil-de-philae

Posted by: chuck0 Jun 16 2015, 08:33 PM

Regarding the Philae telemetry page:
while it is correct that the webmaster of that site mentioned that he should probably update it he did also mention that it is showing the latest data on twitter. The only parameters that are currently updated correctly for Philae are PSSH_C_SBat_CH as well as PSSH_C_SBat_DCH which are solar panel current and rechargable battery current. Most data is from the 13th but there are also a few measurments from the 14th.

Posted by: alphasam Jun 16 2015, 08:42 PM

Interesting comment from Gaudon about the battery recharging, not seen that before. If true that's brilliant as that was previously mentioned as one of the possible failure points from the low temperatures.

Posted by: Gerald Jun 16 2015, 09:49 PM

They've been prepared to operate without the battery, directly with power from the solar panels.
But now there seems to be a chance, that the battery can be charged, and operated as initially planned.

Posted by: Explorer1 Jun 17 2015, 07:00 AM

Press conference coming up in half an hour:

http://www.esa.int/spaceinvideos/esalive

Posted by: Paolo Jun 17 2015, 07:27 AM

I'm on site at le Bourget! i will try to record it on my phone

Posted by: Paolo Jun 17 2015, 07:39 AM

if you have any question for the press conference let me know!

Posted by: 4throck Jun 17 2015, 08:20 AM

Lot's of interesting data being shown, including a landing site model, camera field of view and orientation, etc.
Very interesting.

Posted by: Explorer1 Jun 17 2015, 08:20 AM

They are being so thorough in their presenting that I'm struggling to find anything to ask!


Archive should be here once it's done.

http://www.esa.int/spaceinvideos/Keywords/Description/ESA_Live_Archive/%28sortBy%29/published

Posted by: DoF Jun 17 2015, 08:26 AM

I have at least one question Paolo.
How about MUPUS PEN (the hammering penetrator), are they going to run that again? They didn't list it in their risky instrument suite (they did mention MUPUS as one of the first experiments to be run, but then they were referring to the thermal sensors). Obviously you can't redeploy the penetrator, so I suppose it depends on how it lies.

Edit: My questions aren't that important, but here is another one anyway.

Perhaps a way too soon to speculate, but any chance they will try to move (hop) Philae when winter starts approaching again on its side of the comet hemisphere for an of chance of sampling yet another location?

Posted by: Explorer1 Jun 17 2015, 08:49 AM

Looks like they're confident that they can turn Philae in the right direct to (eventually) drill the surface!

Also great preview of science results; carbon-rich materials cementing the ice grains, rather than the reverse. Papers getting published in a few weeks.

Posted by: Paolo Jun 17 2015, 11:22 AM

sorry, I was not able to record with the mobile and read the forum at the same time

Posted by: DoF Jun 17 2015, 02:43 PM

They didn't take that many questions anyway. The most interesting part to me was probably what Explorer1 mentioned, although I suppose that's a long way off.

Posted by: Greg Hullender Jun 17 2015, 03:58 PM

Looks like the next opportunity for contact with Philae will be on Friday.

http://spaceflightnow.com/2015/06/15/scientists-seek-to-stabilize-radio-link-with-comet-lander/

Posted by: Floyd Jun 17 2015, 04:48 PM

Here is the revised Philae position from the article in Spaceflight Now .

Posted by: fredk Jun 17 2015, 05:28 PM

That revised Philae position image was released http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2015/06/Revised_lander_search_area (always best to cite the original).

Posted by: Habukaz Jun 19 2015, 02:02 PM

...and we got more contact.

https://twitter.com/esaoperations/status/611894877417291776

Posted by: Greg Hullender Jun 19 2015, 04:40 PM

Slightly more data on today's contacts. There were two contacts, each 2-minutes long. 185 packets of data were collected.

They didn't say when the next contact would be, but they ended with this:

"The Rosetta and Philae teams will be closely monitoring subsequent transmissions between the spacecraft, not only to better determine the health of the lander, but also to understand the length and frequency of available communication timeslots. This information is needed to determine when to upload new commands in order to restart science operations and, similarly, when the data can be downloaded."

http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2015/06/19/rosetta-and-philae-in-contact-again/

Posted by: alphasam Jun 19 2015, 05:51 PM

A bit more info,

http://www.dlr.de/dlr/en/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-10081/151_read-13980/#/gallery/17198

The two previous transmissions contained status information from early May showing Philae was at least awake by then.

Posted by: MahFL Jun 19 2015, 08:12 PM

"In the meantime, new commands have been uploaded to Rosetta to further adjust its trajectory and distance from the comet to improve the radio visibility between the two spacecraft, with the first sets of thruster burns having taken place this past Wednesday and the next set planned for Saturday morning. The goal is to bring Rosetta to about 177 km from the comet nucleus and keep it in a range of latitudes that maximise opportunities for lander communication."

http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2015/06/19/rosetta-and-philae-in-contact-again/

Posted by: DoF Jun 20 2015, 05:21 PM

Looks like contact was made today as well, although I haven't seen any reports about it.

Posted by: chuck0 Jun 21 2015, 12:02 AM

Yes, http://isee3.p3s.nl/philae/ again has been updated with new data from Saturday. Quite a bit more than on previous contacts so i would assume that the connection got more stable. Another interesting thing is that some kind of periodicity becomes apparent when looking at the data... i wonder what that is about. Anyways, it will be interesting to see whether they really can start to use for example the MUPUS PEN sensors next week.

Posted by: nprev Jun 21 2015, 03:13 AM

Periodicity, huh? Could be a great many things. I'd assume that the lander-orbiter link is the highest priority right now, so I'm not sure what would interrupt it except for Rosetta downlinking that data to Earth. Does it perhaps correlate to Rosetta's orbital period around the comet at this time?

Posted by: chuck0 Jun 21 2015, 12:54 PM

Really hard to say what the source is since i dont think the time axis in that chart always corresponds to the actual time the data was recorded (the DLR blog mentioned that some data was from May...). Instead it seems like it is the time it was received on the ground. Anyways it nearly looks like a heartbeat

The reported time between those spikes in current is really short (around five seconds).

Posted by: stone Jun 21 2015, 01:35 PM

Could it be that the time stamp is the receiving at the rosetta orbiter?

I think at -135°C temperature and no energy at all the internal time keeping of Philae became bogous anyway.
There was no downlink to Philae so were should the timing come from?

Posted by: Herobrine Jun 22 2015, 03:24 PM

I do believe the timestamps originate on the ground, or on Rosetta, and are not based on the data from the lander. There are multiple reasons to think this is true, but the most telling reason is that this data is supposed to be from much earlier, perhaps even May, from what I've heard, but the timestamps appear to correspond with the days the data were received.

I've been working from the assumption that the cyclical nature of the battery data reflects the day/night cycle from Philae's location.
I dump the raw data from that server to a CSV file and play with it in Excel.
I like to imagine that Philae is trying to describe the surrounding terrain to me with its battery data as the shadows move across the panels.

That's just multiple cycles of one of the data series since Philae woke up, lined up side-by-side to form a surface, in case you're curious. Interestingly (to me), that particular data series doesn't seem to show up in the charts on the telemetry page, and the series aren't labeled in the raw data from the server, so I have no idea what it even represents.
(I dug through the javascript of that page once, back in November, to figure out what was what and what it was doing to the data before displaying it, but I've forgotten all of that and don't feel like doing it again right now.)

Here's a graph of the time (in milliseconds) between data points over the span of the new data (since the 14th or whenever):

Vertical axis is logarithmic. The highest peak corresponds to a gap of 4 days 16 hours. Assuming the timestamps are added by Rosetta, I'd like to think the relatively flat, long stretch is indicative of a more stable connection. If they're added on the ground, they could just represent different downlink modes on DSN or something; who knows; I really lack the context and background to draw any informed conclusions from any of this.

Edit/Update:
There were a few tweets from @DutchSpace over the weekend about the telemetry.

https://twitter.com/DutchSpace/status/612163178101907456 (includes chart)


https://twitter.com/DutchSpace/status/612167466211495936 (includes chart)


https://twitter.com/DutchSpace/status/612539793386401792 (includes chart)


I noticed that the label for the bottom chart has been updated so it looks like there is/was some work being done to improve the telemetry page.

As long as I'm editing, I might as well throw out more wild speculation. If the number of data points is correlated with the number of packets received, then, given the 300 packets reported for the first communication session, and the 84 data points for the first block of new telemetry data, one could guess that the current total of 336 data points received since wake-up indicates about 1200 packets (actually, the math of 336 * 300 / 84 comes out to exactly 1200) have been received so far out of the I-forget-how-many packets they said were stored on Philae.

Posted by: alphasam Jun 22 2015, 06:44 PM

Interesting, if not entirely positive, article from Le Point (in French) apparently regarding conversations with Gaudon,

http://www.lepoint.fr/astronomie/mission-rosetta-de-nouveaux-contacts-instables-etablis-avec-philae-22-06-2015-1938939_1925.php

Gist is it says there were two further contacts over the weekend on Saturday and Sunday, but none with uninterrupted communication windows longer than 2 minutes. They need at least 15 minute windows apparrently to upload commands to Philae. Says they'll try to get Rosetta down to 160km around Wednesday.

Posted by: scalbers Jun 22 2015, 06:59 PM

Interesting they mention uncertainty in the orientation of Philae. I had thought they earlier stated they had a good sense of that. And the mosaic I had made, with the help of Mattias' sun vector also gives some potential information about orientation, with an estimated 80 degree tilt compared with the "local" surface. We can even see the CONSERT antenna in the mosaic. The specification of orientation is better though before the rotation maneuver, though we can get a sense of this by the shift in the ROLIS images before/after.

Posted by: alphasam Jun 22 2015, 07:04 PM

I suspect the point is Philae might not be in the orientation they left it, if it is tilted more on its head that might explain the communication difficulties.

Posted by: scalbers Jun 22 2015, 07:07 PM

Makes sense that Philae could have shifted. I believe though the CONSERT antenna projects off the lower part of one of the sides, unless there's another reason the head (top) would be important.

Posted by: chuck0 Jun 22 2015, 07:25 PM

We didnt hear anything form the mission today... i just hope that they dont run into another safe mode. The Startracking failure graph they showed at the last press conference was pretty scary.

The blue line represents how many issues there have been with the star trackers and the dotted grey one is the distance to the comet. X-Axis is comet distance to the sun... Even when they kept far away from the nucleus the star trackers now seem to have tons of problems so close to the sun.

Posted by: ollopa Jun 22 2015, 07:28 PM

I note that people are still commenting on the http://isee3.p3s.nl/philae/ data. My understanding is that this has NO relation to actual Philae data. The webmaster told me as much a week ago. Unless someone can cite a recent confirmation that this is now reliable, I suggest it cannot be relied upon.

Posted by: Herobrine Jun 22 2015, 07:36 PM

Well, I quoted several tweets from @DutchSpace (mentioned at the top of the telemetry page) several posts back in this thread, but maybe seeing is believing.

https://twitter.com/DutchSpace

Posted by: chuck0 Jun 22 2015, 07:38 PM

I assume this guy is the web master right?

https://twitter.com/DutchSpace/status/612539793386401792

as far as i understand it there are only a few variables updated properly right now. The whole upper graph is useless (is this what you mean when you said "the webmaster told me as much"? ). The only relevant stuff are some of the current measurements in the lower one ( PSSH_C_SBat_CH and PSSH_C_SBat_DCH are current from the solar panels and the recharchable battery discharging current). If this is not really data from Philae then it at leasts corresponds nicely with the times contact was reported...

Posted by: alphasam Jun 22 2015, 07:54 PM

Philae communicates through an S band antenna on the head. It has a visibility cone of 60 degrees to the positive z (straight up). So if Philae is pointing to the ground....

Posted by: Herobrine Jun 22 2015, 08:02 PM

For what it's worth, the bottom graph at http://isee3.p3s.nl/philae/ is fed by the same data source as http://www.musc.dlr.de/philae/telemetrie.html (the science sequence graph is the only one that includes the new data), but the isee3 page has a much easier-to-use graph and is being maintained (for example, over the weekend the lower graph was relabeled). The data that feeds the bottom graph on the isee3 page can be accessed at http://www.musc.dlr.de/philae/db_pss-status.php?filename=pssh_v_sbat-c.json and the data that feeds the bottom graph of the DLR page can be accessed at http://www.musc.dlr.de/philae/db_curent_5_landung.php?filename=pssh_v_sbat-c.json (this is the exact same data as the other one, but with the pre-landing data omitted).

Posted by: scalbers Jun 22 2015, 08:12 PM

If Philae is still pointing as in this mosaic, we can see the top of the lander is aimed generally at (or a bit left of) Perihelion Cliff (green dot in center of yellow solar circle). Thus I wonder if Rosetta is possibly being maneuvered to catch the line of sight pointing just above Perihelion Cliff, thus at a latitude more to the north? This would actually not be at the zenith of Philae's latitude. North is in the center of this mosaic.

Is there a way to check Rosetta's current latitude? How much of the 60 degree cone is pointing above Perihelion Cliff? Is alphasam's 60 degree figure an angular radius?

Posted by: Herobrine Jun 23 2015, 07:56 PM

Well, I've tried at multiple points during the day today and every time, I've found that the data sources the isee3 page uses for Philae telemetry ( http://www.musc.dlr.de/philae/db_pss-status.php?filename=pssh_v_sbat-c.json for the power systems) are now 404ing. If you've been watching it to spot new data from Philae, you can still use the URL the DLR telemetry page uses ( http://www.musc.dlr.de/philae/db_curent_5_landung.php?filename=pssh_v_sbat-c.json ). It has contained identical data to the other one, with the exception that the data set doesn't include pre-landing data.

Posted by: Herobrine Jun 24 2015, 07:59 PM

I see 4 new data points in the telemetry (the battery data, specifically), with the following timestamps:
2015-06-24 17:24:11
2015-06-24 17:28:35
2015-06-24 17:33:00
2015-06-24 17:37:24
Prior to these, the last data point had a timestamp of 2015-06-21 02:44:16.
Hopefully, this means we'll be hearing that contact was made today.

The raw data corresponding to the 5 data points I mentioned (including the last one from the contact several days ago):

Posted by: chuck0 Jun 24 2015, 10:34 PM

Thanks for posting this data! Was already wondering whether they disabled the public api completely.
I guess since there are only four new data points they are still struggling to get a stable connection. I wonder if they will consider leaving the terminator plane to get a longer communication window...

Posted by: scalbers Jun 24 2015, 10:37 PM

Wouldn't the latitude they are stationed or orbiting at be more of a factor than being on the terminator plane (as per post #97)?

Posted by: chuck0 Jun 24 2015, 11:04 PM

Right lattitude has to be really important as well. Since Philae can currently only communicate when it gets sunlight i would assume that the optimal position for getting a long communication window would be between the sun and the comet and at the lattitude of the lander... Btw, according to malmers page Rosetta is now at 170km and still in the terminator plane.

Posted by: scalbers Jun 24 2015, 11:44 PM

Good point about sunlight communication constraints relating to relative longitude and being at that longitude near local noon. My point was that if the lander is highly tilted towards the north, then the latitude of Rosetta should correspondingly be more north as well to line up with the antenna. However not so far north that Perihelion Cliff gets in the way. It might be a sweet spot and a bit less than ideal if Philae's antenna happens to point below the top of Perihelion Cliff.

Posted by: katodomo Jun 25 2015, 03:25 AM

I doubt they'll move Rosetta out of the terminator plane anytime soon - for safety reasons.

Posted by: fredk Jun 25 2015, 01:36 PM

What reasons? If they move out of the terminator plane, then for part of an orbit they will be "upwind" and "downwind" of the nucleus from the sun. The sun-facing side of the nucleus might be expected to release more particles than the night or terminator areas. And the solar wind will eventually push particles downwind. So it might seem like the terminator plane would have the fewest particles.

But are inner comas that asymmetric? Maybe the concern is that very powerful jets may yet erupt and are more likely to point sunwards?

Posted by: Malmer Jun 25 2015, 03:18 PM

I was thinking about adding some kind of indicator of comunicatability on my rosetta now page. a dotproduct between rosettas position vector and philaes local surface normal would be one part and then perhaps a dotproduct between the surface normal and the sun vector to give an indication of philae energy budget... that gives two scalars... if i multiply them you get a sortof communication factor...



Would that be interesting?

Posted by: fredk Jun 25 2015, 04:44 PM

That would be interesting. Toss in the dot product between the lander body's +z axis and the lander-orbiter vector, for ability to receive signals from the lander, and you've got something very interesting. I believe someone mentioned a roughly 60 deg transmission cone about z+. Perhaps scalbers can "point you in the right direction" for z+.

Of course this would be with the caveat that the +z axis direction is not known very well and may have changed since landing. There's also the caveat that the very local normal may not agree well with the normal determined from your shape model, and of course cliffs/boulders will block sun and communications. But a plot of these three indicators vs time (and perhaps their product) would be very cool to see since it would give an indication of when communication might be possible...

Posted by: climber Jun 25 2015, 05:21 PM

From Twitter, another brief contact last night.
https://twitter.com/philae2014/status/614093166166298624

Posted by: climber Jun 25 2015, 05:36 PM

And another one from Mopus itself: https://twitter.com/philae_mupus/status/613990454460325888

Posted by: scalbers Jun 25 2015, 05:52 PM

Sounds pretty interesting. I do have the green dot at my estimated z axis location. However I may want to ask opinions about the latitude of Philae at its location. Also, do we know the longitude and (solar) hour angle of Philae when the CIVA mosiac was taken? My diurnal solar track, horizon, (and green dot) is presently assuming Philae is on the equator. Being over the edge of Hatmehit it may really be a somewhat southerly latitude.

The ultimate would be if we can consider the shadow of Perihelion Cliff in the calculations, though this would only be relevant if Rosetta were to move in to higher north latitudes.

Posted by: chuck0 Jun 25 2015, 08:22 PM

Adding this measure would really be pretty nice. Though as others have mentioned using the local surface normal at Philaes suspected location might be not really robust. Instead you could take a sphere around the position and compute your measure for all vertex normals in there. After that the measures can be averaged (maybe weight values at the center of the sphere higher and at its boundary lower? ). And right, the most exact thing would be to actually reconstruct the landers actual orientation from the CIVA pano.

Btw, another interesting thing could be to mark the locations of rosetta when contact was established. Though to get this right we would have to know what time the timestamps in the telemetry blips actually relate to. As others have suggested it is probably either Rosetta or Ground time...

Anyways malmer your work is really really impressive!

Posted by: Malmer Jun 25 2015, 11:08 PM

I calculated a very good estimate of the suns direction vector in Philaes body coordinate frame using the CIVA panorama. Problem is that I do not have the exact timestamp when the CIVA pano was taken. I do not exactly know how philae is rotated around that vector but it is fairly well constrained. The horizon is in frame and we know Philaes position (or a good candidate pos at least)

sun vector:
http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?s=&showtopic=7896&view=findpost&p=215678

Problem is that they moved Philae after that Pano was taken... but that was a rotation around its Z axis right? so that would make no real difference in comms? Unless it also tipped over?

I really would like that Civa Timestamp...

Posted by: Herobrine Jun 25 2015, 11:23 PM

Chuck, I haven't checked the timestamps of the battery data points against reported times of contact (when I'm not on a phone, I'll take a crack at it) but assuming the actual contact times for any of the post-wakeup comms have been reported, it shouldn't be too hard to check if the timestamps match the contact time or the DSN downlink time or neither. I posted the battery data received yesterday 7 or so posts ago and the timestamps were:
2015-06-24 17:24:11
2015-06-24 17:28:35
2015-06-24 17:33:00
2015-06-24 17:37:24
The MUPUS tweet climber posted shows a timestamp 1 minute after the last battery data point, so they're likely the same type of timestamp. I'll take a crack at seeing if I can correlate the timestamps with the contact times later tonight.

Posted by: scalbers Jun 25 2015, 11:38 PM

Indeed it's reasonable to assume a rotation about the Z axis and it wouldn't impact the communications, nor the direction/azimuth of tilt of Philae. I think a reasonable estimation of the latitude corresponding to Philae's horizon can help correlate with the solar diurnal arc, if the exact CIVA pano time is unavailable.

Posted by: Herobrine Jun 26 2015, 03:38 AM

After looking through these times and timestamps, I can only conclude that the timestamps in battery data from November 2014 are UTC SCET, but that the timestamps in battery data from June 2015 are in UTC ground receipt time.

I can see a clear indication of the separation event in the power data at timestamps corresponding to the time of separation, down to the minute. I can also see a clear indication of the initial touchdown and of the penultimate touchdown, both with timestamps matching the time those events are said to have occurred, down to the minute.

When I look for post-wakeup communication, on the other hand, timestamps in the power data match reported ground receipt times instead. For example, the first post-wakeup signals "were received at ESA's European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt at 22:28 CEST on 13 June", so 2015-06-13 20:28 UTC, which matches (down to the minute) the timestamp of the first post-wakeup battery data point, which is 2015-06-13 20:28:46.025.

Posted by: alphasam Jun 26 2015, 05:25 PM

Some new info from the Rosetta blog;

http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2015/06/26/rosetta-and-philae-searching-for-a-good-signal/

Edit:

And DLR;

http://www.dlr.de/dlr/en/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-10081/151_read-14019/#/gallery/311

Posted by: scalbers Jun 26 2015, 06:16 PM

Good links - and interesting that they are varying the latitude to assess the communications. Somewhat surprisingly it seems (so far) to be a better signal at lower latitudes suggesting not so much Philae tilt to the north. It also might fit into the notion that Perihelion Cliff helps to block the signal. Rosetta is flying over the morning terminator, so Philae is really just waking up when Rosetta is passing over the meridian. As the sun rises higher in the east southeast, Rosetta would be retreating lower to the east northeast in the sky and disappearing behind Perihelion Cliff. I wonder if they will consider flying over a bit later in the morning?

Judging from what I heard some time ago, ESA may know Philae's orientation in absolute terms and that should suffice to predict in assessing antenna alignment.

(EDITED June 27 1616UTC)

Posted by: Herobrine Jun 26 2015, 07:09 PM

That new Rosetta Blog post contradicts the conclusion I reached regarding the latest timestamps. It says "the contact on 24 June started at 17:20 UT (on board Rosetta)". That is only 4 minutes before the first power system data point, so if the contact with Rosetta started at 17:20 UT, the timestamp couldn't possibly be the time it was received on the ground, because the signal travel time from Rosetta to Earth is around 16 minutes right now.
Either the two reported ground receipt times I used last night (to determine the nature of the timestamps) erroneously reported Rosetta contact times as ground receipt times, or the latest blog post is wrong, or the meaning of the timestamp changes for some reason.

I'm inclined to believe that the latest blog post is correct and that the earlier reports simply misreported spacecraft times as ground times, because that makes the most sense, since the timestamps in the power system data from November 2014 are definitely spacecraft times and I don't have any other reason to think they would change.

If they are Rosetta times, then that is good news because they indicate times that Rosetta was in stable-enough communication with Philae. I've never touched a SPICE kernel before, nor do I know much about them, but I may just have to play around with them later to see if I can figure out where Rosetta was during those contacts with Philae.
The time spans of power system data points from the post-wakeup contacts are (all times UTC):
2015-06-13 20:28:46.025 - 2015-06-13 20:29:29.839 (84 Philae power system data points)
2015-06-14 21:22:51.609 - 2015-06-14 21:23:14.022 (only 2 data points)
2015-06-19 13:20:36.425 - 2015-06-19 13:35:58.438 (8 data points)
2015-06-20 13:55:29.277 - 2015-06-20 14:04:05.573 (62 data points)
2015-06-20 15:59:17.222 - 2015-06-20 15:59:31.859 (113 data points)
2015-06-21 02:32:53.429 - 2015-06-21 02:33:10.115 (20 data points)
2015-06-21 02:43:50.338 - 2015-06-21 02:44:16.879 (47 data points) (There was a MUPUS timestamp of 2015-06-21 02:44:16 tweeted as well)
2015-06-24 17:24:11.336 - 2015-06-24 17:37:24.992 (4 data points) (You could extend that range to the MUPUS timestamp tweeted yesterday, which was 2015-06-24 17:38:43)

Posted by: chuck0 Jun 26 2015, 07:21 PM

Thanks a lot for looking at those timestamps so thoroughly!
And the two blog posts are really interesting... i wonder if they stay at the morning side of the terminator because that is the zone of lowest activity? Also getting to the night side would probably take quite a while since they are so far away. Anyways i think that the information that distance to the comet seemingly did not improve connection quality is good news. This way they can try to optimize the orbiter/lander geometry in a much safer zone. Also it is interesting that one of the landers antennas might be damaged. I really dont envy the flight ops team. Now they have another really complex issue to juggle around. This mission is really a nail biter from start to (probably) finish.

Oh, and yeah i think ill take a look at those spice kernels as well

Posted by: Herobrine Jun 26 2015, 08:43 PM

While I'm thinking about timestamps and communication windows, here's a chart of the amount of time between data points in the post-wakeup power system data.

Note: The vertical axis is logarithmic and the horizontal axis is not linear time; it's evenly spaced data points.
The time ranges I mentioned a couple posts back, for the different Philae-Rosetta communication sessions are indicated by the red, vertical dividers. For each of those ranges, the last time is missing from the graph because it represents the time until the next range (so it's off the chart, high).

I keep looking at the time between data points to see if it can tell me anything about the stability of the communication. So far, I haven't been able to conclude anything other than that there is no simple relationship. There are many deltas that clearly occur often (98 ms, 117 ms, 234 ms, 1400-2000 ms, and 264500 ms, to name a few) but, without knowing a lot more about what data is being transmitted and how the communication between Philae and Rosetta works, I can't really draw any conclusions from it. It seems like there might be different modes of transmission, or perhaps just different types of data at different times. One thing I do notice is that the times between data points are much lower, on average, than they were in November 2014 (most of which were around 264500 ms). I'm assuming the times are shorter now because there isn't a lot of other data being transmitted, just "housekeeping" data.

Posted by: Herobrine Jun 29 2015, 11:57 AM

DLR has truncated the data from the URL I've been using. Unless I find a new one, I can't check timestamps and things anymore.

Posted by: Herobrine Jun 30 2015, 05:26 AM

Since DLR has cut off their live telemetry feeds, I've put up a copy of all of the battery-related Philae telemetry that had appeared online up to 28 June for anyone who wants it.
(I don't believe any post-wakeup temperature data for Philae ever made it into the DLR-sourced telemetry that was found on the isee3 page.)
There are 2004 data points of power system/battery data for Philae. The last 340 data points are post-wakeup.
The first data point is at 2014-11-11 00:12:22.260 UTC.
The last data point is at 2015-06-24 17:37:24.992 UTC.
The Timestamp column is from the raw data. I've added the equivalent UTC column for convenience.
There are 14 columns of data. 7 of them are labeled and those labels come from the DLR telemetry page. The other 7 did not show up in the graphs on the DLR telemetry page (nor the isee3 page) and I do not know what they represent (I have some guesses) so they are labeled UNKNOWN_1 to UNKNOWN_7.
The file is a CSV file. Columns are delimited by "," and rows are delimited by a carriage return + linefeed.
http://herobrinesarmy.com/philae_telemetry.csv

Edit:
If you're opening this with Excel then, depending on your locale, it will probably butcher the UTC field.
Here's another version, formatted in a way so Excel won't try to be clever about interpreting the values in that column.
http://herobrinesarmy.com/philae_telemetry_excel.csv

Posted by: climber Jun 30 2015, 04:54 PM

Video and visual information on what's going on in order to talk to Philae: https://twitter.com/dlr_en/status/615892892276625408

Edit: can't make the video play from the link above, get a single picture instead. Sorry I don' t know how to either make it work or delete my post...

Posted by: ngunn Jun 30 2015, 05:57 PM

It plays OK for me, but it's just 30 seconds, right?

Posted by: akuo Jun 30 2015, 06:08 PM

It'd be great if you could give a short summary.

Posted by: alphasam Jun 30 2015, 06:27 PM

Odd, only managed to get it to work on Tweetbot on my phone (but not on pad :-S and not on Twitter).

Anyway, just says they haven't been able to establish contact for 6 days. They believe philae's antenna visual cone is pointing north from its location and they will be flying Rosetta along latitudes that bring it through the cone until at least this Friday so hope to have contact before then.

Posted by: ngunn Jun 30 2015, 06:30 PM

He holds the paper cone at Philae's position (left hand end of the model) pointing more or less directly upward to show where communications are possible. He then motions with his hand to show how the current orbit of Rosetta has been designed to pass through the cone.

Posted by: centsworth_II Jun 30 2015, 10:11 PM

He motions his fist from (your left) to right, showing the path of Rosetta through the communication cone which faces north.

Posted by: chuck0 Jun 30 2015, 10:26 PM

If anyone is interested in Rosettas recent trajectory i made a small web application to look at it (goes even a little into the future). This is still a very early prototype so both comet and probe are only represented as simple cubes (that are not oriented correctly), but the flight path visualization is working. The pattern they are going to fly is pretty special (they didnt do anything like that up until now). To zoom out use the mouse wheel and you will have to wait a bit until all trajectory data is loaded.

http://www.googledrive.com/host/0B_Y5O4C6aiKmfktCSlJEb2N1d2h0WElIcEs1R081OXdfUS01MFV4Ukk4RGFGUllPMFNZZms/

Oh, and this will work best on up to date Versions of Google Chrome and to a lesser extent on Firefox

Posted by: Herobrine Jul 1 2015, 01:36 AM

@chuck0 This is fantastic. Thank you for making this. I had no idea they were zig-zagging like that since first contact. Keep it up!

Posted by: climber Jul 1 2015, 10:15 AM

I didn’t realize, at landing time, that we had a quite narrow communication cone between Philae and Rosetta. This could explain the intermittent communications between the 3 landings.
ESA probably assumed that Philae was to land more or less leveled. I’m also surprised afterwards that the nominal mission called for stopping the gyroscopes once on the ground. We would not have had this com. issue and will, may be, have landed in a better position if they were still working?
Finally we’ve been lucky that Philae landed in the position it did since we could have had a perfect lander ready to operate but unable to talk to Rosetta. We’d have assumed that Philae was dead and may be stopped listening to him after a while…while he was still trying to communicate.
I guess we are learning how to land on small bodies but I fell we’ve been a bit lucky with this one. I hope Rosetta and Philae will get in touch soon.
I’ll be glad to hear from you all since I may have misunderstood the whole issue. Thanks

Posted by: Malmer Jul 1 2015, 12:24 PM

I added a communication cone to Philae on my Rosetta Now! simulation page:

http://mattias.malmer.nu/rosetta-now/

I had already used the CIVA panorama to determine the suns position in Philaes bodyframe coordsys.

I then used an approximate (give or take 20 minutes) guesstimate for the CIVA time-stamp to lock down the suns vector for philaes candidate landingspot.

(Accomazzo talks about the panorama and mentions that it was taken an hour ago while there is an UTC clock in the background)

I oriented Philae around the sun vector until the horizon in the CIVA images matched up well enough. That gave me an estimate vector for Philaes Z+ direction. I aligned a 60 degree cone to that vector and there you have it...

Then I went here to brag about it and saw the screengrab from Koens cool presentation. Looks like I'm not that far of.

@chuck0 Very Cool indeed! You can use my shapemodel if you like.

Posted by: Sherbert Jul 1 2015, 06:57 PM

Nice one Mattias!

That is pretty much how I was envisioning it from Scalbars work and my own almost entirely intuition based ideas. It is interesting that the graphics presented at the Paris airshow and the guesstimated position by CNES, suggested Phillae's top panel, hence antenna, is pointing more towards the neck and lower lobe. The communications windows in November 2014 suggested the communications cone was similar to what was expected at Agikia, that is pointing almost perpendicular to the top of the comet and this shows just that. The trick now is to intercept that cone from a terminator orbit while Phillae is in afternoon daylight. Inevitably this means either the cliffs and ridges of Spider Hill, or the mountainous rim of the Hatmehit basin, are going to be a big factor in blocking the line of sight.

Another issue I was wondering about was the amount of ions present in the coma between Rosetta and the comet. Essentially, has an "Ionosphere" capable of interfering with radio communication, been established and if so at what distance from the surface? Given that ionisation of the coma is largely initiated by photoionisation by UV from the Sun, even flying directly "over the top" of Phillae during the day may result in scrambled communications. The ionisation of the coma is only going to increase as we approach Perihelion. Knowing next to nothing about things radio, could anybody out there shed some light on this?

Posted by: chuck0 Jul 1 2015, 07:14 PM

@malmer thx, and that cone really helps with getting an idea about the required geometry between lander and orbiter. As for the model, i will gladly use it once i get the attitude data out of the spice files... though it certainly wont look as nice as the renderings you do for the rosetta now page

Posted by: Herobrine Jul 1 2015, 08:27 PM

Here are the contacts between Rosetta and Philae that yielded Philae battery telemetry data points from the 13th to the 24th, annotated on chuck0's Rosetta Trajectory application.

The red parts of the line are the time spans of Philae battery telemetry data that were formerly available from DLR (and on the isee3 page). I extended each range backward one pixel to make them more visible and to account for some of the time required to establish/set-up a stable communication link (can't remember how long they said that takes).
The number next to each range is the number of data points of battery telemetry received during that time (based on the DLR data).
The cyan range at the end is Rosetta trajectory after the last time I checked the DLR data (before they disabled it).

Note: The "62" and "113" ranges are on the line coming back to the left.

Edit: To clarify, the trajectory line in this picture goes from 13 June to 1 July. The span of battery telemetry data points involved is from 13 June to 24 June.

Posted by: Sherbert Jul 1 2015, 09:23 PM

Nice graphic Herobrine.

That suggests to me that either Perihelion Cliff, or "Spider Hill", is blocking almost half the cone, but the crater rim is less of a problem, at lower latitudes in particular, illustrating the comments from ESA. Oh for a detailed topographical model of the Abydos environs. This area being mainly in shadow during the close orbit phase, I guess there are just not enough images of adequate resolution and illumination from multiple angles, to construct one.

Posted by: machi Jul 1 2015, 10:32 PM

Good work!

Posted by: chuck0 Jul 1 2015, 11:20 PM

@Herobrine thanks for putting those times into proper context!

Btw, did anyone already post Philaes nominal communication range? According to this

http://www.rmki.kfki.hu/~szalai/Publications/Bibring-Philae-2006-fulltext.pdf

it is rated with up to 150km so they are really keeping the orbiter at the outer limit of this. I think under all those circumstances getting more science out of Philae will be a major achievement... i really love this mission for all the changing circumstances that require tons of improvisation. Keeps things interesting

Posted by: scalbers Jul 2 2015, 10:31 PM

I'm on the road right now just briefly checking in. Nice to see the cone from Mattias and I agree the lower part would be blocked. Maybe a bit more than half of the cone could be intersecting Perihelion Cliff in the NE and off to the N. Will be interesting to see if Rosetta can be positioned toward the favorable part of the cone, maybe a moderately high angular altitude in the NNW sky.

Posted by: alphasam Jul 3 2015, 02:20 PM

Another update from Lander Control;

http://twitter.com/DLR_en/status/616963983002730496/video/1

No new contacts, they are going to send a command on Sunday to Philae to turn on its Consert antenna. This will have different visibility constraints and so may allow contact.

Sounds all a bit desperate unfortunately, something is clearly not quite right.

Posted by: climber Jul 3 2015, 05:47 PM

I don't feel it this way. Why will you sent a desperate command on a sunday? This looks like an antena alignment opportunity to me. Time will tell, as ever.

Posted by: chuck0 Jul 3 2015, 06:24 PM

Well in one of the DLR blog posts there has been talk about one of the two transmitters on Philae not working properly... maybe the second one failed now as well?

Posted by: surbiton Jul 4 2015, 12:09 PM

Doesn't look good. Maybe it is "too hot" now.

How much of "new" data came out of Philae ?

Posted by: Herobrine Jul 6 2015, 03:14 PM

Quick update video from DLR today: https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/618054472191901696/pu/vid/640x360/g_OHm1pUDntmQmNr.webm

Associated tweet: https://twitter.com/DLR_en/status/618054586499244037/

Summary: Rosetta hasn't received anything from CONSERT after their first attempt. They will try again Thursday under different geometrical conditions. Another status update is expected Friday.

Posted by: chuck0 Jul 8 2015, 09:53 PM

Rosetta navigation data now available up to July 24th. They are still in their scanning path on the terminator. At closest approach they will be at 150km now. It is interesting to see how quickly the terminator plane is now changing so close to perihelion.

Posted by: Daba Jul 9 2015, 07:53 PM

From: http://bit.ly/1JXbj2l

"Another problem may be that the lander simply can’t hear. After analyzing the data received from last month’s sporadic contacts, engineers have determined that at least one of the lander’s two receivers is broken. If the second receiver is similarly compromised, then the mission is effectively over."

Posted by: Paolo Jul 10 2015, 12:40 PM

a new contact (at last!) yesterday
http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2015/07/10/new-communication-with-philae-commands-executed-successfully/

Posted by: climber Jul 10 2015, 01:41 PM

Reminds me when Spirit was kind of living is own Life when she used to have her flash issue after landing.
Very encouraging News BTW.

Posted by: scalbers Jul 10 2015, 03:19 PM

Yes - remarkable that the command worked to turn on CONSERT, so Philae can receive as well. As the report mentions, it's unclear why this communication worked and some others didn't. I wonder how the successes and misses map out with Rosetta's latitude, and "hour angle" of both Rosetta and the Sun? Nice that they had a good signal over 12 minutes too.

Posted by: surbiton Jul 12 2015, 12:39 AM

A 12 minute continuous communication should be able to pinpoint Philae's exact location. Right ? Next we need new pictures.

Posted by: nogal Jul 15 2015, 06:20 PM

A new 30 seconds update from DLR. Another attempt to contact Philae and send commands to turn on CONSERT will be made on Sunday . https://twitter.com/DLR_en/status/616963983002730496?autoplay=true

Fernando

EDIT: Apologies for the confusion, an unfortunate combination of wishing for good news and being "Pluto stoned". This clip is from July 3 as dshaffer correctly points out (thank you).

Posted by: dshaffer Jul 15 2015, 08:05 PM

I believe this is an old report - dated July 3.

Posted by: xflare Jul 16 2015, 03:15 PM

https://twitter.com/DLR_en/status/621692897868541952

Latest update. Likely problems with the transmitters on Philae, a software patch has been sent to Rosetta to transmit to Philae.

Posted by: alphasam Jul 20 2015, 08:55 AM

New status update from the blog with plenty of new details. Mostly about Philae so I've posted here.

http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2015/07/20/rosetta-and-philae-status-update/

Tldr version; no new contacts. Philae is designed to cycle between transmitters, one may be damaged (one receiver too) hence contact problems. They sent a signal to Philae to make it only use the working components. Philae's orientation may be changing, altering visibility cones. Rosetta had another star tracker issue and has had to pull away a little. They will try to activate a science program using only the non-moving instruments.

Posted by: scalbers Sep 22 2015, 06:58 PM

Is this true there was a contact near the end of August?

http://apexbeats.com/recent/2920-08/philae-lander-wakes-makes-contact-mission-controllers/

Here is more detail on the overall strategy:

http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2015/09/11/understanding-philaes-wake-up-behind-the-scenes-with-the-philae-team/

Posted by: stevesliva Sep 22 2015, 07:05 PM

Unlikely. The "7 months" mentioned there would be Nov-June, not Nov-Aug. So it's June prose "published" in August.

Posted by: ollopa Sep 22 2015, 10:10 PM

ESA's Philae Lander System Engineer, Laurence O'Rourke was unequivocal in Dublin last night (Monday): the last contact was July 9th., but they are not giving up.

O'Rourke gave what was easily the best public lecture I have seen on Rosetta. Crammed full of details. Combined with the extraordinary blog a week ago last Friday (http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2015/09/11/understanding-philaes-wake-up-behind-the-scenes-with-the-philae-team/), it is hard to fault ESA (and DLR staff) openess when it comes to things they directly control.

O'Rourke's talk was organised by a local astronomy club here, who usually offer mail-order DVD's of the event several weeks later: https://astro1.securesites.com/sub/DVDbuy.htm

I am not associated with the group and I offer the link only for those who might be interested.

Posted by: scalbers Oct 29 2015, 06:57 PM

As Rosetta moves closer to 67P in the coming weeks, there's some hope to hear from Philae again.

https://twitter.com/DLR_en/status/658644692570124288?lang=en

Posted by: scalbers Nov 12 2015, 09:48 PM

Latest Philae2014 Twitter video update is from Nov 9 and it is mentioned that Rosetta is closing in faster than expected and now within 200km range. So we are entering the possible period of hearing from Philae, until the comet gets too far from the sun in January.

Posted by: Bill Harris Nov 12 2015, 11:46 PM

Niagara Falls... slowly I turned, step by step... inch by inch...

But seriously, Philae has returned an amazing amount of science despite the trials and tribulations of her "arrival event" (see the post uptopic about the latest news on The Dynamic Duo). So once Rosetta's signal gets strong enough Philae may wake up.

--Bill

Posted by: akuo Dec 22 2015, 10:53 AM

The Finnish Meteorological Institute is reporting here locally that packets were received from Philae last night.

Posted by: Herobrine Dec 22 2015, 12:11 PM

Posted by: akuo Dec 22 2015, 12:29 PM

Yeah, they have a "unique" way of informing things about Philae / Rosetta.

But they do have science instruments there, and are within the official ESA loop. The sources are Walter Schmidt and Minna Palmroth at FMI.

Posted by: alphasam Dec 22 2015, 12:51 PM

Well unique in that ESA don't inform anyone and wait for others to get fed up and leak it...

I'm skeptical, but on the other hand I'd be surprised if FMI are making it up, as said above they are involved in this and other ESA projects.

Edit; this is the article in question, from the Finnish state broadcaster YLE, http://yle.fi/uutiset/komeetalle_laskeutuneen_aluksen_jouluyllatys_herasi_yllattaen_horroksestaan/8547143

You'll need to google translate it.

Posted by: Herobrine Dec 22 2015, 05:02 PM

9 hours ago, Minna Palmroth tweeted:

https://twitter.com/MinnaPalmroth/status/679219830713688064
which means, as best I can translate it without knowing the language, something like 'Just received contact with Philae after 7 months of silence!'

Then someone corrected her to 5 months.
Then 7 hours ago, she tweeted:
https://twitter.com/MinnaPalmroth/status/679249152153358336
which means something like 'Comet lander's Christmas surprise: woke up suddenly from its dormancy'.

Then 15 minutes ago, she tweeted:
https://twitter.com/MinnaPalmroth/status/679342421659017216
which means something like "A great guy #Philae, a bit like #Finland - it doesn't shout about itself #space"

Edit: Added other tweets

Posted by: akuo Dec 22 2015, 05:15 PM

Some details here by a Finnish space journalist: http://tiedetuubi.fi/avaruus/komeettalaskeutuja-philaeen-saatu-yhteys

Interesting bits:
- the radio contact lasted for 10 seconds at 3:17 EET (1:17 UTC) last night
- 51 packets were received by Philae mission control in Cologne

Posted by: akuo Dec 23 2015, 11:23 AM

An update from the above source: http://tiedetuubi.fi/NODE/2147 .

Main points:
- ESA press officer Pål Hvistendahl confirms Rosetta received something
- No useful data received, but new attempts will be made when Rosetta is in Philae's view
- on the night of Dec 21/22 a signal was received
- telemetry packets were received but they did not contain useful information
- signals on this frequency should be only from Philae
- Philae will only transmit after it has succesfully received a packet from Rosetta

Posted by: climber Jan 1 2016, 08:52 PM

Here is an article (in French) regarding attempts to communicate with Philae.
Basically they say that Philae's temperature will still be ok until January 15th but that they'll continue listening until end of January.
They also confirm receiving 2 bips decembre 21-22 probably from Philae.
http://www.ladepeche.fr/article/2015/12/29/2246422-mission-rosetta-philae-repond-toujours-ecoutes-poursuivent.html

Posted by: Habukaz Jan 8 2016, 03:07 PM

http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2016/01/08/philae-status-report-time-is-running-out/

Spin wheel to be switched on:

No contact from Philae since 9 July; December event determined to have been something else:

Posted by: Weywot Jan 12 2016, 11:04 PM

Koen Guerts says in the https://twitter.com/DLR_en/status/686915239007404032 that OSIRIS made an image series of the landing site to look out for a dust cloud, which might be caused by a movement of Philae.
But still no signals from Philae directly.

Posted by: climber Sep 5 2016, 03:08 PM

Rosetta found Philae! Yes

Posted by: Bernard Sep 5 2016, 03:13 PM

Here it is...
http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2016/09/05/philae-found/

Posted by: nogal Sep 5 2016, 03:15 PM

Here is the link to the ESA news release announcing Philae's discovery:
http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Rosetta/Philae_found

Fernando