Comet lander ‘on slope’
– Europe’s robot lab Philae was “working well” on the surface of its host comet, though likely perched on a steep slope, ground controllers said a day after the probe made its historic landing.
Some data suggested the washing machine-sized probe may have touched down three times on the low-gravity comet, which is zipping towards the sun at 18km per second, according to updates from ground control.
Philae’s anchoring harpoons failed to deploy, but it still managed to send back scientific data for the European Space Agency flagship mission as well as the first-ever picture taken from the surface of a comet.
“Philae is working well. Its battery is working well and is providing power,” mission head Philippe Gaudon of France’s CNES space agency said by phone from ground control in Toulouse yesterday.
Paris
We believe Philae bounced (possibly three times) but sits safely on the comet now
A tweet about Philae
But photographs the robot lab had sent back suggested “it is likely on a steep slope”.
A tweet in the name of Philae’s Mupus onboard instrument said: “Magnetic analysis reveals three landings at 15:33, 17:26 and 17:33 UTC (GMT).”
Equipped with 10 instruments, Philae is designed to carry out an array of experiments on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
It is the highlight of a massively complicated €1.3 billion (R18 billion) project more than two decades in the making.
The mission aims to test theories that comets – primordial clusters of ice and dust – hold secrets about how the solar system was constructed 4.6 billion years ago and maybe also seeded Earth with some of the ingredients for life.
Rosetta, carrying Philae, was hoisted into space in 2004 and took more than a decade to reach its target in August this year, having used the gravitational pull of Earth and Mars as slingshots to build up speed.
The pair covered 6.5 billion kilometres together before Wednesday’s separation and Philae’s 20km descent.
Philae was designed to operate for about 60 hours on a stored battery charge, but several months more with a sunlight boost.
The mission is scheduled to end in December 2015, when the comet heads out of the inner solar system. –