14 DAY TRIAL // Officials with the European Space Agency (ESA) say that the Rosetta spacecraft will be put into hibernation mode as soon as possible, as it begins the longest leg of its massive cosmic journey.
The first opportunity to do so will arise on June 8, and mission controllers plan to take it. The space probe will spend more than 31 months (about two years and a half) in this state, as it is heading further outwards through the solar system.
Its goal is to approach the comet 67-P, but the journey is scheduled to last for about 10 years, so there is still a long road ahead. In the coming years, the probe will be conducting the loneliest leg of its journey.
In order to be able to reach Comet 67-P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the ESA Rosetta spacecraft needs to preserve its strength. As such, it must go into hibernation next week, a state that will enable it to endure the hard conditions of traveling through space.
The probe is managed by ground controllers at the ESA European Space Operations Center (ESOC), in Darmstadt, Germany. They say that systems including telecommunications and attitude control will be brought offline by the new commands.
Since January 2011, ESOC scientists gradually powered down, and eventually shut off, all of the spacecraft's scientific instruments, so the measures they will take next week are the final steps in a carefully-thought-out process.
“Rosetta is getting farther from the Sun, and soon there simply isn't going to be enough sunlight to power its systems,” explains the head of the ESOC Solar and Planetary Mission Operations Division, Paolo Ferri.
“We already achieved a record in July 2010 when we reached 400 million kilometers from the Sun and became the most distant spacecraft ever to operate on solar power alone. Rosetta will double the record distance during the hibernation period,” he goes on to say.
A few onboard computer and several heaters are the only components of Rosetta that will continue operations during the 31-month journey. The latter will prevent the coldness of space from rendering all other components useless.
The spacecraft will be programmed so that it wakes up at exactly 1000 GMT, on January 20, 2014. About seven hours after the timer sends its wake-up signals, the probe is scheduled to send a contact signal to mission controllers on Earth.
“We've planned for hibernation for some time, and it's a complex phase of the mission,” explains the ESOC Spacecraft Operations Manager, expert Andrea Accomazzo.
“Still, for the flight control team, it's an emotional moment. We're essentially turning the spacecraft off. We're already looking forward to January 2014 when it wakes up and we get our spacecraft back,” the ESA official concludes.