Earth severs ties with silent comet probe
Print Edition
GROUND controllers bid a final farewell yesterday to robot lab Philae, cutting communications after a yearlong silence with the tiny probe hurtling through space on the surface of a comet.
“Today communication with Philae was stopped,” Andreas Schuetz of German space agency DLR said from ground control in Cologne.
“This is the end of a... fascinating and successful mission for the public and for science.”
The decision to cut the link was taken to save energy on mothership Rosetta, orbiting around comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, for the final weeks of its own historic mission.
Its batteries depleted, Philae’s last successful communication with Earth was on July 9 last year.
The washing machine-sized probe has been on 67P’s surface since November 12, 2014, a part of the European Space Agency’s groundbreaking Rosetta mission to probe a comet for clues to the origins of life on Earth.
Rosetta’s own mission will come to an end on September 30, when it makes a crash landing to join stranded Philae on the comet surface.
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