Rosetta’s ‘Philae’ Makes Historic First Landing on a Comet

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After more than a decade traveling through space, a robotic lander built by the European Space Agency has made the first-ever soft landing of a spacecraft on a comet. Mission controllers at ESA’s mission operations center in Darmstadt, Germany, received a signal confirming that the Philae lander had touched down on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on Wednesday, […]

Rosetta’s Comet Scrambling Its Jets

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This image of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, taken by Rosetta’s Optical, Spectroscopic, and Infrared Remote Imaging System (OSIRIS) on Sept. 20, from a distance of 4.5 miles (7.2 kilometers), shows jets of dust and gas streaming into space from the neck of the comet’s nucleus. Images of the comet nucleus, taken by Rosetta earlier in the summer, […]