Europe's comet orbiter back after 'dramatic' silence
https://www.yahoo.com/tech/europes-comet-orbiter-back-dramatic-silence-103209568.html?nhp=1
Paris (AFP) - Europe's trailblazing spacecraft Rosetta has resumed its exploration of a comet hurtling through the Solar System after a "dramatic weekend" in which contact with Earth was lost for nearly 24 hours, mission control said Thursday.
The orbiter's navigation system, which works by tracking the position of stars, likely became confused after mistaking dust particles near the comet surface for faraway heavenly bodies, the European Space Agency (ESA) said.
"We lost contact with the spacecraft on Saturday evening for nearly 24 hours," mission manager Patrick Martin said on the agency's Rosetta blog.
In orbit around comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, Rosetta is now some 428 million kilometres (266 million miles) from Earth and 468 million km (291 miles) from the Sun -- somewhere between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter -- travelling at a speed of 17.65 km per second (10.96 m/s).
"Preliminary analysis by our flight dynamics team suggests that the star trackers locked onto a false star," said Martin, as Rosetta descended to within five kilometres (3.1 miles) of the frozen space rock blasting out jets of icy dust.