No. 16 - Cruise Phase Begins
On the subsystems side the first battery was reconditioned by discharging it to a lower level of charge, to be kept for the entire Cruise 1. Some new On-Board Control Procedures (OBCPs), developed post-launch by the ESOC Flight Control Team to support on-board software maintenance activities, were uplinked to the spacecraft. They will be first used in the next reporting period to ease Star Tracker and Camera software patching activities.
The spacecraft was slewed to bring the Sun to +50° above the +X axis for 24 hours (8 June), then up to +70° on 9 June, to characterise the thermal effects of high solar aspect angles at short Sun distances (currently still below 0.9 AU). During this activity, an S-band carrier without modulation was switched on via MGA / TRSP2 and successfully acquired at New Norcia in coherent mode.
Finally, reconditioning of the second battery started on the 10 June.
For the second time a ground station pass over New Norcia was skipped.
The table below shows a chronology of the main activities in the reporting period:
Mission Day |
Date |
DOY |
Main Activity |
95 |
04/05.06.04 |
156/157 |
OSIRIS extra slot pass 2 |
96 |
05/06.06.04 |
157/158 |
Monitoring |
97 |
06/07.06.04 |
158/159 |
Skipped ground contact! |
98 |
07/08.06.04 |
159/160 |
Monitoring |
99 |
08/09.06.04 |
160/161 |
Thermal characterisation +50° |
100 |
09/10.06.04 |
161/162 |
Thermal characterisation +70° |
101 |
10/11.06.04 |
162/163 |
Monitoring pass |
At the end of the last New Norcia pass in the reporting period (DOY 163, 01:40) Rosetta was at 49 million km from the Earth. The one-way signal travel time was 2 minutes 44 seconds.