Europe’s Rosetta spacecraft has finally spotted its tiny lander Philae, thought to be lost forever, stuck in a ditch on the surface of a comet hurtling through space, ground controllers said Monday.
“THE SEARCH IS OVER! I’ve found @Philae2014!!” the European Space Agency (ESA) tweeted on behalf of Rosetta, orbiting comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko at some 682 million km from Earth.
The agency released a photo of the washing machine-sized robot lab on the comet’s rough surface, one of its three legs thrust dramatically into the air.
This was the first sighting of Philae since its rough landing in November 2014.
The image was captured by Rosetta’s OSIRIS narrow-angle camera on Friday and downloaded two days later — just weeks before the official end of the ground-breaking science mission to unravel the mysteries of life on Earth.
“With only a month left of the Rosetta mission, we are so happy to have finally imaged Philae and to see it in such amazing detail,” Cecilia Tubiana of the OSIRIS camera team, the first person to see the images, said in a statement. The Twitter page of Philae, its communications unit switched off in July, remained silent.
The 100-kg probe touched down on comet 67P in November 2014, after a 10-year, 6.5 billion km journey piggybacking on Rosetta.
Philae bounced several times after its harpoons failed to fire, and ended up in a ditch shadowed from the Sun’s battery-replenishing rays. Until now, nobody knew exactly where.
The tiny lab managed to conduct 60 hours of experiments and send home data before running out of power and entering standby mode on November 15, 2014.
“We were beginning to think that Philae would remain lost forever. It is incredible that we have captured this at the final hour,” said Rosetta mission manager Patrick Martin.
The photo was taken at a distance of 2.7 km from the surface of the comet, which is speeding away from the Sun at nearly 15 KM per second. Rosetta is drawing closer to the comet for its own swansong.

Source: Arab News