After the 86-second thruster burn on 22 October, Rosetta has lined up on a near-perfect Earth approach trajectory. Flight dynamics and mission control experts at ESOC, ESA's European Space Operations Centre, have determined that today's manoeuvre slot will not be used (click on 'Full story' for details). -- Daniel

"Based on an analysis by the Flight Dynamics team here at ESOC, we have decided not to use the manoeuvre slot available today. If we were to use, then the manoeuvre magnitude would be just 2 mm/second and this is smaller than the uncertainty we currently have on its value," says Trevor Morley, senior flight dynamics expert working on the Rosetta mission, who replied by email.

The analysis was based on radiometric data received up to and including the NASA Deep Space Station DSS 54 pass that ended at 01:20 UTC on 2 November.

Practically speaking, Rosetta is almost perfectly lined up and there would be almost no advantage by performing a thruster burn on 6 November.

Rosetta is forecast to pass over a watery point just South of the island of Java at an altitude of 2481 km and a speed of 13.34 km/second relative to the Earth.

This estimate will be updated in the coming days.