Lose Your Craft in a Crack and You Can’t Get it Back

That’s a Philae !

I know. I couldn’t resist. As soon as I saw the headlines about the lost Philae craft and how the Rosetta mission team found it lost in a crack, I had that song running through my mind.  But, behind the levity is a great story about loss and redemption, space-exploration style.

As you may recall, the Rosetta spacecraft studying Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko sent a tiny little lander called Philae down to the surface of the comet’s nucleus. It landed on November 12, 2014, but it was a bouncy landing that placed the little robot in the shadow of an icy cliff.  Due to its peculiar orientation, the batteries couldn’t recharge (very little sunlight was hitting the solar panels). That meant the lander only worked for a short time before falling to sleep.  It actually did wake up again in June 2015, but that didn’t last long either.  Philae has been in hibernation ever since, and the mission scientists have spent time trying to locate its exact landing spot on the comet.

Philae  Craft Found!

On September 2, Rosetta passed within 2.7 kilometers of the comet’s nucleus and snapped images of the region where Philae landed.  There, in the narrow-angle images, the mission team finally found what they were looking for: evidence of Philae’s location and orientation. It was an amazing finding, considering that the spacecraft is moving with respect to the comet, which is moving with respect to the Sun, and rotating, too. It’s really like finding a needle in an icy haystack.

When you stop to think about the fact that Rosetta is due to encounter the surface of the comet during a final “one-way” mission  in about a month, the discovery of the final resting place of the Philae craft is all the more amazing. You can read more about the logistics of the search on ESA’s Rosetta site.

Comet Exploration Done Right

The Rosetta mission is an astounding success, with its almost three-year exploration of a cometary nucleus. Back in grad school, I studied comets, and always wondered about the chunks of dirty ice at their hearts. Rosetta has shown us that these are eerie-looking worlds with familiar-looking features. Canyons, mountains, sprays of ice and dust, piles of chunky ice that look like rocks, and smooth plains all tell a tale of the comet’s origins and evolution. Philae’s short life of data-taking told a tale, too, lending a lot of new data to our knowledge of comets. So, even if it did get its craft in a crack and can’t get it back, Rosetta has given us a great gift in our search for an understanding of all the objects in our solar system.

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