Philae Pings From Comet Seven Months After Being Asleep

Seven months after it went silent, European Science Agency's Philae woke up last week to surprise its handlers on Earth.

Philae landed on comet 67P after it was projected from its Rosetta spacecraft last November. It operated for 60 hours before its solar powered batteries drained, BBC reports. Efforts to communicate with the lander were unsuccessful. Though scientists knew the lander had survived the impact, they were not certain if it would wake up. On June 13, the lander communicated for 85 seconds with Earth.

"Philae is doing very well: It has an operating temperature of -35ºC and has 24 Watts available. The lander is ready for operations," Philae Project Manager Stephan Ulamec said.

The control center found that Philae had accumulated around 8,000 data packets in its mass memory, indicating it was awake for some time but simply could not communicate earlier. Around 300 packets have been analyzed.

"We have also received historical data - so far, however, the lander had not been able to contact us earlier," Ulamec said adding that they are waiting for the lander to communicate again.

The Rosetta Mission set out to study the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Philae will study the comet as it zooms through the solar system. After its landing, Philae found that the comet's water vapor constitution was different from that of Earth, indicating that comets like 67P did not give Earth its water vapor.