"SPACE PROBE ROSETTA" the sleeping beauty IS AWAKE!!!



The European probe Rosetta woke up Monday after 31 months of hibernation in a nearly decade-old quest to explore a comet.

The European Space Agency (ESA) announced. "Hello, world!" ESA said on Twitter, imitate the signal sent back from deep space by the billion-dollar unmanned craft.

The agency described Rosetta as a "sleeping beauty" that had emerged from a long sleep.

"It was a fairy-tale ending to a tense chapter," it said.

Europe's most ambitious space mission, the craft was launched in 2004 on a trek of seven billion kilometres (4.3 billion miles) around the inner Solar System.

In August with a comet, 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, and in November send down a lander to carry out experiments on the icy wanderer. Rosetta was put in hibernation in June 2011 by bringing far from the Sun that light was too dim to power its solar clothing. Scientists waited more than eight hours on Monday before getting the priceless signal, sent home from a distance of more than 800 million km (500 million miles), to confirm that it had woken up.