The U.S. Rosetta project: eighteen months in flight

The international Rosetta mission, the 3
^rd
cornerstone mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) has been in operations since March 2, 2004. This year, Rosetta conducted observations of comet 9P/Tempel 1 in support of NASA's deep impact mission. Observations of this comet target were conducted from a distance of approximately 0.5 AU, and provided for approximately 2 weeks of observation time to complement the 800 seconds of observation time afforded Deep Impact's cameras. In this paper we have updated the status of the instruments following the commissioning exercise, an exercise that was only partially complete when a report was prepared for the 2005 IEEE conference. We have presented an overview of the 2005 Earth/Moon activities, and the deep impact set of observations. The paper also provides an update of the role of NASA's deep space network in supporting an ESA request for delta difference one-way ranging to provide improved tracking and navigation capability in preparation for the Mars flyby in 2007