Rosetta Lander - Philae: Operations on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, analysis of wake-up activities and final state

Ulamec, Stephan; O’Rourke, L.; Biele, Jens; Grieger, B.; Andres, Rafael; Lodiot, Sylvain; Muñoz, Pablo Pascual; Charpentier, Antoine; Mottola, S.; Knollenberg, J.; Knapmeyer, Martin; Kührt, Ekkehard; Scholten, F.; Geurts, Koen; Maibaum, Michael; Fantinati, Cinzia; Küchemann, Oliver; Lommatsch, Valentina; Delmas, Cedric; Jurado, Eric; Garmier, Romain; Martin, Thierry

doi:10.1016/j.actaastro.2017.04.005

Cited by 17 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 22 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Moreover, Philae was indeed inside the CONSERT radar triangulation result (see Fig. 24) and its attitude was close to that derived by the ROMAP team [23] and the Philae Lander team [13,19,24]. The image also proved that the lander could not have moved significantly since it landed at Abydos in November 2014.…”

Section: Time Running Out -A Light Shining In the Darknesssupporting

confidence: 72%

The search campaign to identify and image the Philae Lander on the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko

et al. 2019

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

, the Rosetta Philae Lander descended to make the first soft touchdown on the surface of a cometcomet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. That soft touchdown did occur but due to the failure in the firing of its two harpoons, Philae bounced and travelled across the comet making contact with the surface twice more before finally landing in a shaded rocky location somewhere on the southern hemisphere of the comet. The search campaign, led by ESA, involved multiple teams across Europe with a wide range of techniques used in support of it. This search campaign would continue through 2015 where a prime candidate on the surface was identified and on into 2016 to end on the 2nd of September 2016 when a definitive and conclusive image was taken of the lander on the surface of the comet, confirming the prime candidate to indeed be Philae. 1. The Philae landinga bounce into the unknown The Rosetta mission represented a Cornerstone of the ESA Horizon 2000 programme [1]. It was launched in March 2004 and arrived at its prime destination comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (CG) in August 2014, after a 10 year cruise across the solar system. After arrival, activities immediately kicked off to select a landing site for the Philae Lander that had travelled the long journey with Rosetta [2]. With the landing site "Agilkia" chosen in September 2014 (Fig. 1), steps then took place to prepare for the separation of Philae a number of weeks later. Philae separated from Rosetta in the early hours of 12th of November 2014 and drifted down to the surface during a seven-hour descent phase. Communication between Rosetta and Philae took place using the "Electrical Support System" (ESS) located on Rosetta [3]. Contact with the ESS was established between Rosetta and Philae about

show abstract

Section: Time Running Out -A Light Shining In the Darknesssupporting

confidence: 72%

The search campaign to identify and image the Philae Lander on the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko

et al. 2019

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…By using CONSERT ranging data during the FSS, the Philae position was constrained to an area of 15 m × 150 m [6], then refined to 22 m × 106 m [27]. From January 2015 through March 2016, the distance from Rosetta to the comet was too large to take high resolution images of the potential rest area of the Philae lander, though contact was sporadically re-established in June 2015 [4,20] [26]. The Philae lander was finally located unambiguously from an OSIRIS Navigation Camera (NAC) high-resolution image (5 cm/pixel) on 2 September 2016, taken from a 2.7 km distance from the comet surface.…”

Section: Philae Lander Rest Positionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…One of the key moments of the mission was the tumultuous landing of the small companion lander Philae on 12 November 2014. After about seven hours of free fall descent to the comet surface [4,18], and two unexpected bounces after the failure of the anchoring system, the Philae lander finally came to rest at the so-called "Abydos" site, about 1 km from the planned location, in a non-optimal location and unknown orientation, but was able to operate on battery power for about 60 h [18][19][20][21]. The lander was finally identified lying on its side in a deep crevice in the shadow of a cliff, in an image taken by the Rosetta spacecraft on 2 September 2016.…”

Section: Introduction: Rosetta Science and The Consert Experimentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rosetta CONSERT Data as a Testbed for In Situ Navigation of Space Probes and Radiosciences in Orbit/Escort Phases for Small Bodies of the Solar System

Yan

et al. 2021

Remote Sensing

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Many future space missions to asteroids and comets will implement autonomous or near-autonomous navigation, in order to save costly observation time from Earth tracking stations, improve the security of spacecraft and perform real-time operations. Existing Earth-Spacecraft-Earth tracking modes rely on severely limited Earth tracking station resources, with back-and-forth delays of up to several hours. In this paper, we investigate the use of CONSERT ranging data acquired in direct visibility between the lander Philae and the Rosetta orbiter, in the frame of the ESA space mission to comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, as a proxy of autonomous navigation and orbitography science capability.

show abstract

“…This makes ballistic landing trajectories ideal conduits for lander craft that possess only minimal or no control capabilities. However, the very same gravitational environment entails a completely different challenge: Unless sufficient energy is damped at touchdown, the lander may well bounce and subsequently escape from the asteroid, or bounce into a badly illuminated conditions, which would seriously jeopardize the mission [9]. Therefore, research on delivering small, unpowered landers on binary surface has gained a considerable interest.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A comparative reliability analysis of ballistic deployments on binary asteroids

et al. 2019

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Small body missions can significantly benefit from deploying small landing systems onto the surface of the visited object. Despite the potential benefit that they may bring, deployments of landers in small body environments may entail significant mission design challenges. This paper thus addresses the potential of ballistic landing opportunities in binary asteroid moons from a mission design perspective, particularly focusing on reliability aspects of the trajectories. Two binaries that were previously identified as target bodies in several missions/proposals, Didymos and 1996 FG3, are considered in this paper. The dynamics near them are modelled by means of the Circular

show abstract

Rosetta Lander - Philae: Operations on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, analysis of wake-up activities and final state

Cited by 17 publications

References 22 publications

The search campaign to identify and image the Philae Lander on the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko

The search campaign to identify and image the Philae Lander on the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko

Rosetta CONSERT Data as a Testbed for In Situ Navigation of Space Probes and Radiosciences in Orbit/Escort Phases for Small Bodies of the Solar System

A comparative reliability analysis of ballistic deployments on binary asteroids

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About