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