ESA Comet Lander Philae wakes up from Hibernation

       The European Space Agency (ESA) says its comet lander, Philae, has woken up and contacted Earth after 7 months of hibernation.

According to Rosetta's blog, the spacecraft sent signals to Earth for a period of 85 seconds.

Philae which was launched in 2004 in a Rosetta spacecraft landed on Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko last November, and went into hibernation mode due to reduced sunlight and off-nominal spacecraft orientation at its unplanned landing site. The official twitter account for the spcacraft tweeted on Sunday, which said: "Hello Earth! Can you hear me?"

Hello Earth! Can you hear me? #WakeUpPhilae

— Philae Lander (@Philae2014) June 14, 2015

DLR Philae Project Manager Dr. Stephan Ulamec said: "Philae is doing very well: It has an operating temperature of -35ºC and has 24 Watts available. The lander is ready for operations."

Scientists who now await the next contact said the spacecraft may have woken up earlier, as they received a historical data from the probe.

Artist's depiction of Philae '​s touchdown on the comet 67P

About 8000 packets of data in Philae’s mass memory is enough to give scientists information about what happened to the lander in the past few days.

Philae detached from Rosetta on 12 November 2014 at 08:35 UTC SCE, and  landed on the 67P the same day. It is designed to analyse ice and rock on the comet.

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