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Comment by seccess | Hacker News Reader

I haven't seen any discussion of the possibility of Philae receiving light to its solar panels as the comet tumbles through space. Is there no chance of the comet turning to a point where the sun can reach the lander?

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Philae is getting 1 hour of sunlight about every 12 hours. Right now, it's so cold that it has to warm up the batteries before charging them, and it's getting so little light that it can't even do that. It's possible that the rotation might change, but because the probe is surrounded on 3 sides, that's not likely to help. So we'll have to wait for the temperature to get higher and/or the sunlight to get a lot stronger.

Can Rosetta not be angled to reflect sunlight to Philae, Iridium style? How close can Rosetta be placed to the comet?

Even if they could (it’s unlikely) … would they? Philea was a pretty risky and relatively small add-on to the main Rosetta mission. Rosetta does important stuff all on its own, it’s not just a vehicle to get Philae there and relay data.

Rosetta will stay with the comet as it gets closer to the sun and observe it.

Even under perfect conditions, this would provide a tiny bit of extra light for a few seconds per orbit, not even close to enough to make a difference unfortunately.

This is probably not feasible, but in order for reflection to help much Rosetta would have to be much farther from the comet, so that its orbit would be comet-synchronous. Actually I doubt Rosetta has any surface reflective enough to help with this anyway. If it were used this way it would probably not be pointing its transmitter toward Earth.

It's estimated to take between 6 and 14 months but still not guaranteed to produce enough current to recharge the lander.

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