Philae has landed!

November 12, 2014 • 11:34 am

by Greg Mayer

Qapla’!! Philae has landed! The European Space Agency’s Philae lander has successfully landed on Comet P67, and begun transmitting data.

Philae, as seen from Rosetta, on its way to the comet (European Space Agency, ESA)
Philae, as seen from Rosetta, on its way to the comet (European Space Agency, ESA)

If you rewind the live feed, the success signal is received at exactly 3:00:00 (17:03 CET in Darmstadt), so you can see the reaction in the control room. Here’s the BBC coverage, which includes the hugging in the control room.

Here’s the comet itself, taken by Rosetta, prior to the landing.

A view of the comet (European Space Agency, ESA).
A view of the comet (European Space Agency, ESA).

William Shatner is providing live tweet coverage, and there’s coverage from the Telegraph, the Guardian (lots of nice pictures at the Guardian), and the NY Times. There was also live coverage in the US on NASA TV, but I think that has now ended.

Qapla', Klingon for success, written in the Klingon script plqaD.
Qapla’! (Klingon for success, written in the Klingon script plqaD).

EDIT from Matthew Cobb: xkcd was *live-cartooning* the whole event, with updates to his cartoon in real time. Tanya Harrison has assembled them all into this nifty gif (pronounced…)

54 thoughts on “Philae has landed!”

  2. Waiting to hear if the anchors are set. There was some concern at the end of the press conference that they had not deployed.

  4. Way to go USA!! Oh wait we didn’t do anything because NASA’s budget was dramatically cut. Once the leader in the space race, now we can’t make it around the track.

      1. Two active Mars rovers currently. The Opportunity Rover has been active for over ten Earth years while the Curiosity rover has been exploring since August of 2012.

        The Cassini mission still continues to orbit Saturn as well. It sure would be nice to have orbiters for Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune to complete the study of the planets our solar system minus the Trans-Neptunian objects such as Sedna, Eris, Makemake, Haumea, etc…

        2. to complete the study of the planets our solar system minus the Trans-Neptunian objects such as Sedna, Eris, Makemake, Haumea, etc…

          New Horizons.
          Fly-by in a year.

          1. Righto. Pluto is considered a Trans-Neptuniun object. July of 2015 is the flyby time. Also NASA will switch the spacecraft sensors completely on in some three weeks during the first week of December. Exciting times indeed!

          2. To be honest, when the IAU’s bun fight over classifying PLuto was going on, I took the “if it’s a sphere (to a certain precision) then it’s a planet. Which would have made PLuto about the 10th planet discovered, Neptune the 9th, and inserted Ceres, Vesta and maybe a couple of other asteroids into the list ahead of PLuto. Of course, it took into the 1940s and 1950s to start to acquire sufficient light-curve data to demonstrate closeness to sphericity.
            Did I do any of the planetary symbols in my last bout of Unicoding?
            Fraid not 🙀 (U+1F640 ; WEARY CAT FACE 😉 I’ll consider it at the weekend.

    4. NASA did participate but I’m not sure how. A small Canadian company did the communications.

      2. NASA is doing the mission to Pluto. That is going to be interesting. And its a lot farther than this comet.
        So lets not have any more dissing of ‘Merica, ok?
        USA! USA!

    5. I’ve no doubt that there’s at least one navel-gazing Exceptional Amuricun who resents any non-Amuricun accomplishing something. (Speaking as an Amuricun mahself.)

    1. It almost brought a tear to my eye. It’s truly amazing what our species can do when we use the understanding and innovations provided by science to complement our curiosity of the Cosmos. I am utterly amazed and deeply humbled by this achievement.

  7. Latest
    19.20 That’s all for today. It’s been quite emotional, and it’s not over yet. Where is Philae? It seems that nobody knows at the moment. A press conference is scheduled for 2pm tomorrow so we should get some more updates by then. Wherever it is, it has been a remarkable day for science.
    19.10 So it appears that the Philae lander bounced when it hit the comet and lifted off once more before settling somewhere away from original touchdown site. Scientists have also lost the radio link because the probe is now below the horizon and will not be contactable until tomorrow morning.

    From the Telegraph

    1. I was wondering if shooting anchors into the surface might to that. Action and reaction.
      But I do not know how the anchor mechanism actually works.

  8. It’s at times like this that I feel truly sorry for the devoutly religious. While we’re content to know that we live in a vast and mysterious universe whose secrets we’ll never fully understand – but which we can explore and chip away at bit by bit, learning a little more with each year, each generation, each century – they remain locked in their mental prisons, their minds filled with desiccated dogma, living in their little 6000-year old universe, filled with ghosts, demons, “prophecies” “sins” and all the other vacuous nonsense that’s all they have to show for 3000 years of wasted effort. As rationalists and scientists we have the courage to explore the unknown, revelling in the fact that we don’t know what we’re going to find, and that what we do find may even require us to ditch a lot of our earlier ideas. They live in constant fear that their god is going to torture them forever if they do, say, think, see or eat the wrong thing.

    Science has just reached out and touched another world 300 million miles away, less than one human lifetime since the first rocket left the Earth’s atmosphere. If the priests, imams, mystics and mullahs study their “holy” books for another thousand years they won’t be any closer to telling us what god “really” wants than they are now. They should reflect on that, but of course they won’t.

    3. It was particularly nice to see women scientists as part of the control center, celebrating along with the men. What a difference from those nations where women are not even allowed to study, let alone be scientific leaders along there male partners!

  11. Congratulations ESA and the Rosetta team! Well done. Great to see this after all the NASA cuts here and the commercial space flops in the last couples of weeks.

    Really lifts my mood.

    Nice comics series xkcd! Love it!

    Can’t wait to see the images from the comet surface.

    I hope they get those harpoons deployed!

    1. Yep, Biz-ness tends to pop its collective bill about being able to do anything better than Guvmint.

  13. As far as I know, none of the scriptures of any of the religions predicted that humans would put a spacecraft on a comet. Well the scriptures also failed to predict humans going into space, they also failed to predict the industrial revolution or 21st century technology.
    I’m pleased to see that for this mission ESA has used names associated with ancient Egypt – Rosetta Stone, Philae island, Agilkia Island, Osiris, Ptolemy. They have also used the name Midas which has links to ancient Greek mythology.

    ESA used Osiris as an acronym for (Optical, Spectroscopic, and Infrared Remote Imaging System)The camera system has a narrow-angle lens (700 mm) and a wide-angle lens (140 mm), with a 2048×2048 pixel CCD chip

    MIDAS (Micro-Imaging Dust Analysis System). The high-resolution atomic force microscope will investigate several physical aspects of the dust particles which are deposited on a silicon plat

    From Wikipedia about Philae island in lake Nasser;
    Philae was so much resorted to, partly by pilgrims to the tomb of Osiris, partly by persons on secular errands, that the priests petitioned Ptolemy Physcon (170-117 BC) to prohibit public functionaries at least from coming there and living at their expense. In the 19th century AD, William John Bankes took the Philae obelisk on which this petition was engraved to England. When its Egyptian hieroglyphs were compared with those of the Rosetta stone, it threw great light upon the Egyptian consonantal alphabet.

    1. “Well the scriptures also failed to predict humans going into space,”

      Let’s face it, they failed to even predict “space” as we know it to go into.

    1. It’s like what the aliens in Contact say to Dr Arroway. You do some great stuff, you do some shit stuff. Words still out on if you’re going to make it as a species.

  19. Everyone is still worried about the exact status of the lander, but in a BBC Web page was a more amusing comment.

    1364. Posted by Kevin1958on 4 hours ago
    This comet was removed because the moderators felt it may have broken the philae lander.

    Good luck to the guys and guyesses working to get the most out of the mission.

    1. ” . . . guys and guyesses . . . .”

      Ever notice how a group of males and females are addressed as “guys,” but never as “gals”?

Comments are closed.