Rosetta is awake

Today at 7.18 p.m. Rosetta's signal arrived at ESA's European Space Operations Center in Darmstadt.

ESA's spaceprobe Rosetta has awakend from its more than 30 months of hibernation. Today at 7.18 p.m. Rosetta's signal arrived at ESA's European Space Operations Center in Darmstadt (Germany) - after 48 long minutes of waiting. Before noon at 11 a.m., an internal timer clock had started a series of commands ending with Rosetta's signal to Earth. The wake-up call marks the last stage of the space craft's ten year's journey to comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, where it will arrive this year in August. In November, Rosetta's lander Philae is scheduled to touch down on the comet's surface.

Rosetta is an ESA mission with contributions from its member states and NASA. Rosetta's Philae lander is provided by a consortium led by DLR, MPS, CNES, and ASI. The Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) is the research institution worldwide with the greatest contribution to the scientific experiments of the Rosetta mission. The institute is home to the Principal Investigators of three instruments: the scientific camera system OSIRIS (Orbiter), the secondary ion mass spectrometer COSIMA (Orbiter), and the gas analyzer COSAC (Philae). In addition, the MPS has contributed to the five other instruments ROSINA, MIRO, CONSERT, DIM, and ROMAP and has developed and built important parts of the lander Philae.