ESA finds comet lander Philae in photos of Rosetta

The European Space Agency (ESA) has found its comet lander Philae in photos from the Rosetta spacecraft. The lander had landed on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014, but ended up misaligning and losing contact.

The ESA writes that the Rosetta mission is still less than a month away and that the spacecraft managed to capture the comet lander on September 2. Philae was found in a dark canyon and was picked up by the Osiris camera aboard the Rosetta from a height of 2.7 km from the comet’s surface. At that height, the resolution of the camera comes down to about 5cm per pixel, the organization writes. In the photos, therefore, details of a 1m large Philae are quite clearly visible.

Philae landed on the comet on November 12, 2014, but the landing didn’t quite go according to plan. For example, it was intended to land in an area called ‘Agilkia’, but the lander bounced after reaching the surface. After a flight of another two hours, Philae finally landed at the location ‘Abydos’, the exact spot was unknown until now. After about 64 hours, the lander’s battery ran out of power because not enough light was hitting its solar panels. In June 2015, Philae again gave a sign of life, but the ESA decided in February to stop sending signals to the comet lander after losing contact since July.

Although the precise location of Philae was unknown, estimates were made within an area of ​​several tens of meters, the ESA writes. Some of the objects that could potentially be the lander had already been captured in earlier lower-resolution images. Until recently, however, these could not be analysed. In doing so, a single object appeared to offer the greatest chance, which has been confirmed in the recent images. “Now that the lander has been landed, we can prepare for the Rosetta landing and look forward to photos close to the probe’s landing site,” said Osiris lead researcher Holger Sierks.

Rosetta is scheduled to land on the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on September 30 and gather information about its inner structure.

Images via ESA, a high-resolution image of the overview shot is also available