(Transcript from World News Australia Radio)
Officials at the European Space Agency have been celebrating the completion of a crucial stage in an almost decade-old mission to explore a comet.
A space probe, known as Rosetta, has been successfully 'woken up' after a hibernation of more than two-and-a-half years.
Santilla Chingaipe has the details.
(Click on audio tab above to listen to this item)
Rosetta is a billion dollar unmanned spacecraft at the centre of Europe's most ambitious space mission.
It was launched in 2004 on a trek of seven billion kilometres around the inner Solar System.
Its goal is to meet up in August with a comet, known as 67-P, and then in November, to send down a lander to carry out experiments on its surface.
Rosetta was placed in hibernation in June 2011 to save power, as it was so far from the Sun that light was too dim to use its solar panels.
Rosetta's onboard computer was programmed to give a wake up call this week, with the probe more than 800 million kilometres from Earth, so it could continue its mission to 67-P.
Nerves were strained at the European Space Agency mission control in Darmstadt, Germany, as scientists waited more than eight hours to receive a signal that the wake up call had worked.
(Clock sound effects)
Then cheering as the precious signal back was received.
(Cheering)
Rosetta operations manager Andrea Accomazzo confirmed that an 'all-is-well' message was showing up on a screen, as a spike in a radio wave.
"We can definitively see the signal from Rosetta. It's up there, you can see it on the screen. There is a big success for everybody. Now we got it back. Now it's up to us to drive it to the comet."
The probe is now so far away that its radio transmissions, travelling at the speed of light, take 45 minutes to reach listening stations in Australia and California.
Another European Space Agency official involved in the mission, Paola Ferri, says there will be many challenges yet to come.
"Rosetta will - for the first time in the history of space flight - reach a comet, stay there, fly around it, a very difficult task because the environment of a comet is extremely dynamic. And it will also deposit a small lander on the surface of the comet. Also the first time that's done in the history of space flight."
Comets are clusters of ice and dust, and are believed to be remnants from the very birth of the Solar System.
The head of the European Space Agency, Thomas Reiter, says it's hoped the mission will provide new information about how the Solar System formed.
And he says it could possibly unlock secrets about how life on Earth was kickstarted.
"(Starts in German, then translation) The mission will give us some indication whether the water that is on our planet actually came from a comet or not. And secondly, it will try to answer the question where the life on our planet came from. There are theories that the comets provided building blocks for the evolution. And will also be assessed during this mission. And it would be a sensation if it proves to be correct."
Over the last quarter of a century, 11 unmanned spacecraft have been sent on missions to comets, most of them flybys.
Successes include the US Stardust probe, which brought home dusty grains snatched from a comet's wake, and Europe's Giotto, which ventured to within 200 kilometres of a comet's surface.
But if Rosetta succeeds, it would outshine them all in terms of its sampling size, proximity and duration.
Share
