On Friday, scientists launched a final, last-chance effort to contact a radio-silent robot-lab which was dropped over a year ago onto the surface of a comet in our solar system.
According to Phys, the European Space Agency (ESA) launched their Philae probe as a part of their Rosetta mission. Since the mission began — with a near crash-landing onto the comet in November 2014 — the probe as yielded valuable scientific results.
However, it has been six months since mission control engineers at the German Aerospace Centre in Darmstadt have had any communication with the Philae probe. At this point, the odds of reestablishing contact with probe have diminished severely.
“The last clear sign of life was received from Philae on July 9, 2015,” the German Space Agency said in a statement. “Since then it has remained silent.”
The contact made in July of last year was a command for the refrigerator-sized Philae probe to use its flywheel. This command was issued in the hope that any dust caking the solar panels which might be inhibiting communication be shaken off.
“It’s an admittedly desperate move,” Philippe Gaudon of the French Nation Space Agency told AFP. “It is very unlikely the robot will become functional again.”
The window of opportunity for making contact with Philae will be closed toward the end of January, when the comet and its hardware will be around 300 million kilometers from the Sun and can no longer operate.
When it was operational, Philae was able to gather data on several organic molecules found on the come’s surface, including four which were never before detected on a comet.