Space

See the first shots from the Rosetta mission’s successful comet landing

Artist rendering of the Philae lander detaching from the Rosetta orbiter.
Artist rendering of the Philae lander detaching from the Rosetta orbiter.
Image: European Space Agency
By
Zach Wener-Fligner
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The Rosetta mission, the combined effort by European Space Agency and NASA to land a spacecraft on a comet, has so far been a resounding success.

The decade-long journey to Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko culminated 317 million miles from Earth just after 11:00 a.m EST on Wednesday, when the Philae lander touched down safely on the comet’s surface.

We can now look at photos from the historic descent. Here are the shots, courtesy of the ESA.

The image shows comet 67P/CG acquired by the ROLIS instrument on the Philae lander during descent on Nov 12, 2014 14:38:41 UT from a distance of approximately 3 km from the surface. The landing site is imaged with a resolution of about 3m per pixel. The ROLIS instrument is a down-looking imager that acquires images during the descent and doubles as a multispectral close-up camera after the landing. The aim of the ROLIS experiment is to study the texture and microstructure of the comet's surface. ROLIS (ROsetta Lander Imaging System) is a descent and close-up camera on the Philae Lander. It has been developed by the DLR Institute of Planetary Research, Berlin. The lander separated from the orbiter at 09:03 GMT (10:03 CET) and touched down on Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko seven hours later.
From 3 kilometers above the surface of Comet 67P.
Image: European Space Agency
Rosetta’s OSIRIS narrow-angle camera captured this parting shot of the Philae lander after separation. The lander separated from the orbiter at 09:03 GMT/10:03 CET and is expected to touch down on Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko seven hours later. Confirmation of a successful touchdown is expected in a one-hour window centred on 16:02 GMT / 17:02 CET. Rosetta and Philae had been riding through space together for more than 10 years. While Philae is set to become the first probe to land on a comet, Rosetta is the first to rendezvous with a comet and follow it around the Sun. The information collected by Philae at one location on the surface will complement that collected by the Rosetta orbiter for the entire comet.
The Philae lander just after parting with the Rosetta orbiter.
Image: European Space Agency
Rosetta’s lander Philae took this parting shot of its mothership shortly after separation. The image was taken with the lander’s CIVA-P imaging system and captures one of Rosetta's 14 metre-long solar arrays. It was stored onboard the lander until the radio link was established with Rosetta around two hours after separation, and then relayed to Earth. The lander separated from the orbiter at 09:03 GMT/10:03 CET and is expected to touch down on Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko seven hours later. Confirmation of a successful touchdown is expected in a one-hour window centred on 16:02 GMT / 17:02 CET. Rosetta and Philae had been riding through space together for more than 10 years. While Philae is set to become the first probe to land on a comet, Rosetta is already the first to rendezvous with a comet and follow it around the Sun. The information collected by Philae at one location on the surface will complement that collected by the Rosetta orbiter for the entire comet.
Lander and orbiter part ways, as taken by the Philae lander.
Image: European Space Agency

Now that the lander has made it to the comet’s surface, the most failure-prone parts of the €1.4 billion mission are out of the way. But the important work is still to come: after 10 years of travel time, the lander has a measly 2.5 days of battery life to churn out as many measurements as possible. (Once these are dead, the Philae will attempt to keep operating on solar-powered backup batteries, though no one knows how long they will survive.)

Apart from the sense of great human achievement that informs all space missions, the point of Rosetta is to gain insight on the universe’s infancy. Comets are the perfect subjects for such study: unlike stars and planets, whose chemistries evolve slowly but significantly, comets are pretty much the same ice balls they were a few billion years ago.

By analyzing this comet’s composition, Philae will help researchers determine the role that comets played in the nascent days of our solar system and the earth—if their ice brought us water, and if the organic matter in their crusts provided the crucial ingredients for life.