Rosetta’s solar wing deployment

Taken back in May 2002, this image shows Rosetta being checked in the ESTEC Test Centre in Noordwijk, the Netherlands.

One of Rosetta’s massive solar wings is undergoing a deployment test, supported on a rig to allow it to unfurl in Earth gravity instead of weightlessness.

Each made up of five hinged panels, the pair of wings stretches 32 m tip-to-tip from the box-shaped spacecraft. Steerable, they have provided sufficient solar power to allow Rosetta to operate as far as 800 million km from the Sun, further than any previous solar-powered mission.  New ‘LILT’ ‘low intensity low temperature’ solar cells were specially designed for the array.

On the top of the spacecraft can be glimpsed Rosetta’s 2.2 m-diameter high-gain antenna, a steerable dish used to return science data to Earth.