A short update from the Rosetta mission team at ESOC, still working today in the Main Control Room. We spoke a few minutes ago with Ignacio Tanco, deputy spacecraft operations manager, who reports that the spacecraft is doing very well, thank you!

Rosetta is operating nominally; the network systems and overall ground segment to control the mission are nominal Last night, Rosetta lost contact with Philae as expected when it orbited below the horizon just after 20:00 CET. Contact was re-established this morning at 06:01 UTC / 07:01 CET, and the Philae-Rosetta radio link was initially unstable. As Rosetta rose higher above the Philae landing site, the link became very stable and the lander could transmit telemetry (status and housekeeping information) and science data from the surface. This morning’s surface link was again lost due to Rosetta’s orbit at about 09:58 UTC / 10:58 CET. Ignacio explains that with the current orbit, Rosetta will have, typically, two Philae communication windows per day. The next window opens at 19:27 UTC on the spacecraft and runs through to 23:47 UTC spacecraft time.

The team are ensuring that Rosetta maintains an orbit that is optimised for lander communication support; they are planning a manoeuvre (thruster burn) today to be conducted on Friday that will help keep Rosetta where it should be. Rosetta already conducted a burn last night as part of this effort.

Rosetta is presently sending signals to the ground stations at about 28 Kbps; Ignacio says that the spacecraft’s own telemetry downlink uses about 1 or 2 Kbps of this, so the rest is being used to download science data from Rosetta and lander science and telemetry from the surface.