Rosetta spacecraft has finally located its long-lost lander, the Philae, just a few weeks before its end of mission.
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The pictures showing the lander’s body and two of its three legs were taken as Rosetta passed within 2.7 kilometers (1.7 miles) of the surface. In images dated September 2, a time when Rosetta shortened its orbit above the comet to about 1.7 miles, the ESA was finally able to locate an object that they could definitively say was the missing Philae lander. “Instead of landing on a flat spot as planned, it bounced and flew for another two hours, ending up … somewhere”, NPR science correspondent Nell Greenfieldboyce said. Rosetta is the orbiter that circled the comet taking images and recording data while the Philae was a lander that was going to head down to the surface of the comet and send back even more data.
“The position, as we find in this image, did not help at all”, Patrick Martin, ESA’s Rosetta Mission Manager, told The Verge.
Last week, however, Rosetta finally captured imagery of the missing lander – doing what it had failed to do during a half-dozen previous flybys. However, as the probe was shaded from the Sun, its solar panels weren’t able to produce enough power and Philae switched into hibernation soon after.
In one month’s time Rosetta will complete its mission by descending to the comet’s surface itself, from where it will conduct a final investigation that will hopefully reveal secrets about the object’s interior structure.
Mission scientists were able to communicate with Philae for three days before the onboard batteries ran out of charge. The Rosetta Navigation Camera image taken on 16 April 2015 is shown at top right for context, with the approximate location of Philae on the small lobe of Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko marked.
The discovery comes just as scientists are pulling the plug on Rosetta.
The first probe to land on a comet did so in November 2014, but the landing did not go smoothly.
The discovery comes less than a month before Rosetta descends to the comet’s surface.
When the lander was dispatched from its Rosetta mothership in November 2014, the landing process didn’t go to plan.
Philae was last seen when it landed on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
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The ESA plans to crash-land Rosetta onto the comet on September 30, because the craft is unlikely to survive lengthy hibernation in orbit as the comet heads away from the sun.
