Rosetta is awake!

Rosetta is awake!  After almost three years of hibernation, the Rosetta spacecraft today woke itself up and reported back to Earth.  The mission's controllers (photo at right) were rather happy about that :)

It will likely be a few days before the controllers have determined Rosetta's state of health, but ... an awful lot of things had to work correctly simply to get the signal they got, right on time, this morning.  There's every reason to be optimistic about the spacecraft's status...