It is time that we say goodbye to the comet lander Philae, the European Space Agency probe that was sent out on the 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko comet nearly a year ago as part of the Rosetta mission. The mission had started nearly 10 years prior to that and now seems to be the time when this particular part of the mission has come to an end.
The Philae spacecraft is a name worth knowing as it has performed the first soft landing on a comet nucleus on November 12th of 2014, while being remotely operated from the German Aerospace Center (also known as DLR) in Cologne, Germany. While the achievements of the spacecraft were undeniable, the shuttle started having issues in late 2014, when its batteries ran out due to reduced sunlight. This led to the craft needing to enter hibernation in hopes that the solar panels would be able to capture enough energy by August 2015 in order to reboot the comet lander.
Sadly, this did not happen due to unexpected conditions the shuttle encountered. After very sporadic communication being established between the spacecraft and the Earth base between June 13th and July 9th, and a temporary re-entering of the online mode, all communications were lost. Scientists have not been able to re-establish a connection with the probe since leading to the conclusion that no further communications with it were likely in January 2016.
The comet 67P that Philae is currently rooted on has entered a phase where conditions on it are increasingly hostile; because it has moved very far away from the sun – approximately 350 million kilometers, temperatures are unbearably low: minus 180 degrees Celsius, or minus 292 degrees Fahrenheit. At that temperature, scientists say that Philae’s system cannot function.
Before the German Aerospace Center deemed Philae ‘dead’, they sent one last signal to the probe in hopes of re-establishing contact with it – an attempt that was unsuccessful. However, due to the increasing difficulty of communicating with the probe before then, it is very unlikely that a response is due to come. If anything, the scientists have left the channel dedicated to the Philae probe open in case it ever comes back to life.
Considering that the final conclusion scientists drew suggests that the total of 8 pings sent from Philae to the Rosetta mothership on the span of a month were actually false positives and merely the failure of transmitters and receivers, the tale of the probe may have ended even earlier than we thought.
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