The hibernating European space probe Rosetta that will rendezvous with a comet more than 500 million miles from Earth this summer woke up Monday after more than two years asleep to tweet: "Hello, world!" It then tweeted the same message in many languages, from "Hallo, welt!" to "Ciao, mondo!" to "Ahoj svet!"The tweets signaled that the spacecraft, which was in sleep mode to preserve power, is getting set for the big meet-up with Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in August. Rosetta was launched in 2004 on a 10-year journey to the comet. It is scheduled to begin orbiting the icy space rock in August and send the 220-pound lander Philae to its surface in November. Using gravity like a slingshot, Rosetta has made three flybys of Earth and one of Mars to push it toward its historic rendezvous.The probe is about 500 million miles from Earth, near Jupiter's orbit, and radio transmissions will take 45 minutes at the speed of light to reach listening stations in Australia and the United States. Rosetta and Philae will travel with the comet around the sun and back into deep space before their mission ends in December 2015.
This was so cool to read about. It goes to show how far our space programs have progressed in the past 50 years. This article was targeted at all audiences, mostly space nerds like me, but it was clearly written and informative. I thought it was clever to have the actually spacecraft live tweeting to show it was awake. Reading some of the tweets, they programed it to sound like a real person, which just baffles me. Hopefully the rest of the mission will be a success, but this alone is an amazing accomplishment for science.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/01/20/rosetta-comet-space-probe-european-space-agency/4661123/
This mission seems really interesting. I'm glad that everything has gone according to plan so far and that everything is on schedule for the summer. I hope that the end of the mission is successful.
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