European spacecraft flys by asteroid, camera stops

[September 06, 2008]  DARMSTADT, Germany (AP) -- The European deep space probe Rosetta successfully completed a flyby of an asteroid millions of miles from earth, but its high resolution camera stopped shortly before the closest pass, space officials said Saturday.

Rosetta caught up with the Steins asteroid, also known as Asteroid 2867, just after 8:45 p.m. Friday in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The probe came within 500 miles of the asteroid.

Officials at the European Space Agency were not sure exactly what caused the camera to balk.

"The software switched off automatically," said Gerhard Schwehm, the mission manager and head of solar systems science operations at ESA. "The camera has some software limits and we'll analyze why this happened later."

Another wide angle camera was able to take pictures and send them to the space center, Schwehm said, adding that the overall outlook for the data was good.

Scientists will present pictures and discuss the data later Saturday.

The Rosetta craft was launched in March 2004 from French Guyana, and is now about 250 million miles from Earth. The 3-mile diameter, irregularly shaped Steins Asteroid is being studied for keys that could help unlock some of the mysteries about the creation of the solar system.

"Dead rocks can say a lot," Schwehm said.

Up until now, astronomers analyzing asteroids have had to work with limited data from brief flybys, such as when ESA's Giotto probe swept by Halley's Comet in 1986, photographing long canyons, broad craters and 3,000-foot hills.

As planned, the Rosetta lost its signal to Earth for about an hour-and-a-half Friday night as engineers turned it away from the sun and the craft zoomed through space too fast for its antennae to transmit any signal.

At 10:15 p.m Friday the craft resumed transmission, signaling that the exercise was largely successful - news cheered by ESA engineers and technicians.

Yet there was another setback Friday night, this time though through no fault of the spacecraft.

Data had to be sent to antenna stations far away from Europe because of the position of the satellite and the curvature of the earth.

One of those stations, a NASA laboratory in Goldstone, California was having problems cooling one of its antennas in the summer heat and had to switch the ESA project to another antenna at Goldstone. That delayed the analysis of some data by several hours.

Rosetta data was also transmitted to an antenna in New Norcia, western Australia.

Data from its working camera was being processed Saturday at the Max Planck Institute in Lindau, southern Germany, while further infrared data collected by the probe was being analyzed at the Instituto Nacionale di Astrofisica in Rome.

The Steins asteroid was Rosetta's first scientific target as it enters the asteroid belt en route to its destination, the comet 67/P Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Rosetta is scheduled to reach the comet in 2014.

Between now and then it will perform some gravitational experiments before going into hibernation, Schwehm said

The European Space Agency is supported by 17 countries including Germany, France, Ireland and the Netherlands. It cooperates with NASA, the European Union, European national space agencies and international partners. It's expected that the ESA will become the European Union space agency in the near future.

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On the Net:

http://www.esa.int

[Associated Press; By KATRIN SCHIEFER and GEORGE FREY]

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