Philae space lander is expected to restart in March

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The space agency ESA expects Philae to be back in operation in a few months. The space lander is said to have accumulated enough energy to start up by March, and after a warm-up period, Philae could be recharged.

The engineers of the space agency are expressing their expectations on Reddit. The space lander is expected to have enough power to boot again by March 2015. Philae must then be warmed up and only then can the technicians think about charging the battery. Once charging has begun, it is expected to take several days for the battery to be fully charged. Philae could be put back to work at the beginning of the summer.

Philae was released from its carrier Rosetta on Nov. 12 and landed a few hours later on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The landing had some problems. Philae had bounced off the surface and landed several hundred yards from its intended landing site. Although the space lander is stable, it is in a position where less sunlight is collected than previously calculated. It would be a rocky part of the comet, where there is only 90 minutes of sunlight every 12 hours.

The goal of the space mission is to collect samples and then analyze them. According to the German space agency DLR, organic molecules have already been observed. Carbon compounds exist in many places in the universe and the scientists are working on further analyzing the data. For example, the ESA scientists want to make comparisons with substances on Earth. The mission was scheduled to end on December 31, 2015. Philae was part of the Rosetta satellite launched in March 2004. In total, it took the satellite more than ten years to reach the terminal and it would have traveled more than six billion kilometers.

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