Rosetta Lander - After seven years of cruise, prepared for hibernation

Rosetta is a Cornerstone Mission of the ESA Horizon 2000 programme. It is going to rendezvous with comet 67P/ Churyumov–Gerasimenko after a 10 year cruise and will study both its nucleus and coma with an orbiting spacecraft and a landed platform. The latter, named Philae, has been designed to land softly on the comet nucleus and is equipped with 10 scientific instruments to perform in-situ studies of the cometary material. Philae has been provided by a large international consortium. Rosetta was successfully launched on March 2, 2004 from Kourou in French Guyana. Philae is operated by the Lander Control Centre (LCC) at DLR, Cologne and the Science Operations and Navigation Centre (SONC) at CNES, Toulouse via the European Spacecraft Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt. The scientific lead is at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Science (Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany) and the Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale (Paris). Since launch, the Lander has been operational during commissioning, several checkouts, two planetary swing-bys at the Earth and one at Mars, fly-bys at asteroids Sˇ teins and Lutetia as well as some additional activities for calibration and failure investigation. Payload checkout PC13 was the last Lander activation prior to a deep space hibernation phase of Rosetta, which started in June 2011 and will last until approaching the comet in 2014. The paper describes the various Lander activities over the past seven years and gives an outlook of near- and on-comet operations. Landing is foreseen in November 2014 at a heliocentric distance of 3 AU. Prior to that, detailed characterization of the comet nucleus has to be performed with the Rosetta Orbiter instruments

The CONSERT operations planning process for the Rosetta mission

The COmet Nucleus Sounding Experiment by Radio wave Transmission (CONSERT / Rosetta) has been designed to sound the interior of the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. This instrument consists of two parts: one onboard Rosetta and the other one onboard Philae. A good CONSERT science measurement sequence requires joint operations of both spacecrafts in a relevant geometry. The geometric constraints to be fulfilled involve the position and the orientation of both Rosetta and Philae. At the moment of planning the post-landing and long-term science operations for Rosetta instruments, the actual comet shape and the landing location remained largely unknown. In addition, the necessity of combining operations of Rosetta spacecraft and Philae spacecraft makes the planning process for CON- SERT particularly complex. In this paper, we present the specific methods and tools we developed, in close collaboration with the mission and the science operation teams for both Rosetta and Philae, to identify, rank and plan the operations for CONSERT science measurements. The presented methods could be applied to other missions involving joint operations between two platforms, on a complex shaped object

The CONSERT operations planning process for the Rosetta mission

In the scope of European Space Agency's Rosetta mission, the COmet Nucleus Sounding Experiment by Radio wave Transmission (CONSERT) has sounded the deep interior of the nucleus of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The CONSERT experiment main objective was to image the interior of the comet nucleus. This bi-static radar experiment with instrument units on-board both, the Rosetta main spacecraft and its lander Philae, requires a specific geometric configuration to operate and produce fruitful science data. Thus, these geometric constraints involve mainly the position and orientation of Rosetta and Philae. From the operations planning point of view, the mission constraints imposed observation slots to be defined far before their execution, while the comet shape, spacecraft trajectories and landing site were still unknown. The CONSERT instrument operations scheduling had to be designed jointly for Rosetta and Philae platforms, based on different time scales and planning concepts. We present the methods and tools we developed to cope with the complexity of this planning process. These operations planning concepts allowed handling the complexity of multiple platform operations and the lack of prior knowledge of the observed target