(AP) Waking up after almost three years of hibernation, a comet-chasing spacecraft sent its first signal back to Earth on Monday, prompting cheers from scientists who hope to use it to land the first space lander onto a comet.
The European Space Agency received the all-clear message from its Rosetta spacecraft at 7:18 p.m. (1818 GMT; 1:18 p.m. EST) - a message that had to travel some 800 million kilometers (500 million miles).
In keeping with the agency's effort to turn the tense wait for a signal into a social media event, the probe triggered a series of "Hello World!" tweets in different languages.
Dormant systems on the unmanned spacecraft were switched back on in preparation for the final stage of its decade-long mission to rendezvous with the comet named 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Systems had been powered down in 2011 to conserve energy, leaving scientists in the dark about the probe's fate until now.
Read full article here.
0 comments:
Post a Comment