Rosetta's lander Philae wakes up: ESA

The European Space Agency (ESA) confirmed on Sunday that Rosetta's lander Philae has sent signals on June 13, contacting the Earth for the first time after about seven months' silence.

The ESA announced in a press release that the signals were received at ESA's European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, Germany, at 22:28 CEST on June 13, and via Rosetta, Philae "spoke" with its team on ground for 85 seconds.

More than 300 data packets have been analysed by the teams at the Lander Control Center at the German Aerospace Center (DLR).

"Philae is doing very well: It has an operating temperature of -35 Celsius degree and has 24 Watts available," explained DLR Philae Project Manager Dr. Stephan Ulamec, quoted by the press release.

"The lander is ready for operations," he said.

According to the ESA, Philae must have been awake earlier, because when analysing Philae's status data, scientists have found historical date that the lander had not been able to send earlier.

"Now the scientists are waiting for the next contact. There are still more than 8,000 data packets in Philae's mass memory which will give the DLR team information on what happened to the lander in the past few days on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko," said the ESA.

Philae, who started a comet chasing tour more than 10 years ago, separated from its mother ship Rosetta on Nov. 12, 2014 and descent to its target Comet 67P/Chuyumov Gerasimenko, some 500 million kilometers away from the earth.

However, the lander bounced twice before landing to a location where it's solar panels could not receive sufficient sunlight to generate enough power. After sending back all acquired scientific data during its first 60 hours on the comet, Philae, whose batteries had exhausted, fell asleep on Nov. 15, 2014. Endit