With its legs poking out of a dark crevice on a speeding comet many millions of miles away, the Philae spacecraft, missing since 2014 after a 10-year trip, has finally been found.
With its legs poking out of a dark crevice on a speeding comet many millions of miles away, the Philae spacecraft, missing since 2014 after a 10-year trip, has finally been found.
Scientists at the European Space Agency announced on Monday that they had located the lander, which touched down on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on Nov. 12, 2014. The landing did not go as planned; the spacecraft bounced and flew for two hours, then lost touch with the agency three days later when its primary battery died and it went into hibernation. The lander briefly awoke in June 2015 and again in July 2015, but hadn’t been heard from since. Its location had been unknown.
On Sept. 30, the Rosetta orbiter is scheduled to make its final descent to the comet’s surface, which is about the length of Central Park. Just in time, photos taken by the orbiter 2.7 kilometers (about 1.7 miles) away on Friday revealed the main body of the missing lander, which is about the size of a washing machine, and two of its three legs.
“This remarkable discovery comes at the end of a long, painstaking search,” Patrick Martin, manager of the space agency’s Rosetta mission, said in a statement on Monday. “We were beginning to think that Philae would remain lost forever. It is incredible we have captured this at the final hour.”
The lander bounced upon impact when a thruster failed to fire, and two harpoons meant to anchor it to the surface did not deploy. Scientists had narrowed its location down to an “area spanning a few tens of meters,” but the images available before Friday were in low resolution, and they showed several objects that might have been the lander.
Though its shady, rocky resting spot meant Philae’s solar panels could not get enough sunlight, leading to the rapid depletion of its battery, it was able to complete 60 hours of observation before it went into hibernation. In that short time, it provided data that cast light on the composition, structure and properties of the comet.
“This wonderful news means that we now have the missing ‘ground-truth’ information needed to put Philae’s three days of science into proper context, now that we know where that ground actually is,” Matt Taylor, a Rosetta project scientist, said in a statement on Monday.
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