Managers for the Rosetta mission are facing the harsh reality that their comet-landing probe may be in danger of running out of juice if it cannot catch some sunrays.

According to BBC News, scientists at the European Space Agency (ESA) are commanding the Philae lander to drill for samples in the hopes that it can do so before the battery runs out. With that conclusion apparently imminent, the mission managers hope they can gather whatever data they can.

There is also the possibility that the lander's battery drains before it can send the data back to Earth. Philae will try to process the samples from Comet 67P/CG in its own laboratories, but it will be some time before the ESA knows if it was successful.

"The drill has been active today, whether it will sample and will succeed in bringing these samples to ovens we shall know this evening," Stephan Ulamec, Philae lander manager, told BBC News. "This would be fantastic but it is not secured - maybe the battery will be empty before we get contact again."

Unfortunately for the mission managers, this is a familiar scenario as the landing attempt. Due to its great distance from Earth, it takes about 28 minutes to send a command and to receive data. Upon landing, Philae did not hit its target and wound up with its solar panels in the shadow of the comet, resulting in it relying on battery power.

"We plan to rotate the lander a little bit so that at the position where we have now this one panel that gets sun, we'll have a slightly larger panel and this would increase the chance that at a later stage the lander could wake up again and start talking to us again," Ulamec said.

With the battery draining, it is all the team can do to hopefully get the most production out of their comet-lander.

"One of the other things about the drill," Monica Grady a professor at Open University, told BBC News, "they are hoping it will move the lander but they don't know how much it will move it, and they don't know if it will bring it out to get more sunshine."

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