Rosetta is known by the agency as the “comet chaser”, and it will crash into its destination on Comet 67P near the end of this month.
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“There’s no point putting an old experiment with old [principal investigators] into hibernation”, mission scientist Kathrin Altwegg joked to Nature in 2015.
“Although we’ve been flying Rosetta around the comet for two years now, keeping it operating safely for the final weeks of the mission in the unpredictable environment of this comet and so far from the Sun and Earth, will be our biggest challenge yet”, says Sylvain Lodiot, ESA’s spacecraft operations manager. “But this is why we have these flyovers, stepping down in small increments to be robust against these issues when we make the final approach”.
Researchers said knowing the precise location of Philae is not just good for comet science, it’s also an emotional relief.
Rosetta project scientist Matt Taylor said that locating Philae provides missing information “needed to put Philae’s three days of science into proper context”. “And now we can redo some of the analysis from the lander and improve on it”. Launched on the top of an Ariane 5 rocket on March 2, 2004, Rosetta cruised for an incredible 10 years and arrived in the orbit around the Comet 67P.
Philae landed on the comet in November 2014 in what was considered a remarkable feat of precision space travel but the metre-sized, 100 kg (220 lb) probe bounced several times before getting stuck against a cliff wall. She was the first person to see the images when they came in from the orbiting Rosetta probe. The lander flew for two hours before eventually settling in what was, until now, an unknown location.
The Rosetta probe is set to end its mission by crashing into the comet later this month, and the team will turn back its focus back to Earth to analyze that huge amount of data the probe has gathered during its historic mission.
“Now that the lander search is finished we feel ready for Rosetta’s landing, and look forward to capturing even closer images of Rosetta’s touchdown site”, added Holger Sierks, principal investigator of the OSIRIS camera. “And that’s what we finally have”.
Finally, Rosetta’s discovery offers a tantalizing glimpse of what’s to come from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return mission. It was supposed to launch in 2003, but a failure of the Ariane 5 rocket delayed the mission until 2004 and caused a change in the comet that was to be studied.
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“We will go down very slowly, under a meter a second, so we can take as many high-resolution pictures and spectrographic measurements as possible”, McCaughrean told the Guardian.
