Probe File: “She’s alive and it works!” – Público.pt

                 

                         
                     

                         
                     

                         

                 

 
                         

“She’s alive and it works!”, Just announced this Thursday the director of the French National Centre for Space Studies (CNES), Marc Pircher, about landing the day before the probe File the heart of a comet. In a press conference broadcast on the Internet, Marc Pircher, who directs the center has an active participation in this mission, said that the probe is stabilized, the instruments began to work at night and already received on Earth images of File .

                     

                         The File , which separated from the probe & lt; i & gt; & lt Rosetta; / i & gt; on Wednesday morning to begin a journey alone 20 kilometers to the comet nucleus, reached its destination at 15:35 (Lisbon time). But there were failures, who preached a scare everyone after the initial party, when everything seemed to have gone well – the harpoons that should hold the comet did not work. So if it ran the risk of File to flee back to space, since the comet’s gravity, being a very small body, is very weak. At the press conference, Marc Pircher said, however, that the probe is immobilized “. She landed and no one is more tinkering”

But, as harpoons did not work, she jumped a few times . Or, in other words, repeatedly landed. “As the harpoons did not work, she said. . We know that shifted “

Philippe Gaudon, project leader of File at CNES, said in a press conference that, in fact, the probe landed three times – that means who jumped two

These jumps and landings took place very slowly. – as if in slow motion. And put the File one kilometer from the initial site of the first landing. Is now a very biased website and does not receive much sunlight, which is a difficult mission. It has 1.5 hours of light every 12 hours to charge batteries

The first landing was, however, in the center of the exact location planned by mission engineers -. One fact that Marc Pircher considered impressive. Never in the history of space exploration had been a mission of this kind. “It’s frankly extraordinary. After ten years of travel, arrive and land on dozens of meters. “

There is always the risk of a File again go up and down, after all the gases that will releasing the comet as it approaches the sun will be increasingly. “[But] there is no reason to move in the coming days,” said the director of the French center, being added so that the scientists can do their job and make the most of the scientific data that engineers will provide you.