Philae spotted just after first landing on Comet 67P/C-G

On Friday, we published a series of remarkable NAVCAM images acquired by Rosetta as the orbiter monitored the intended landing point of Philae on 12 November from its orbit above Comet 67P/C-G. The images show what appears to be the shadow of a dust cloud kicked up when Philae made its first touch down on the surface of the comet at 15:35 UTC. The images were provided by ESA's Flight Dynamics team on Friday, who sent them to the web team to be published as soon as possible: we all wanted to make sure you saw them right away. Once we had convinced ourselves that the dark 'splotch' seen in the second of the images was almost certainly the tell-tale signature of Philae's precise first touch-down and bounce, we put them out. However, some careful work by a number of people in ESA's Flight Dynamics team and by followers of our Rosetta blog has shown that these NAVCAM images show more, namely Philae itself, just after the bounce! It appears as a couple of brighter pixels closely accompanied by its shadow in the form of a couple of darker ones just below, both to the right of the diffuse dust cloud shadow. Credit for the first discovery goes to Gabriele Bellei, from the interplanetary division of Flight Dynamics, who spent hours searching the NAVCAM images for evidence of the landing. Once the images were published, there was also quite some speculation by Rosetta blog readers in the comments section, wondering which features might be attributable to the lander. Martin Esser, Henning, and Kasuha in particular were among the first to make insightful observations on the topic, although many others have since joined in. Last but not least, a careful independent review of the images was made by Mikel Canania from […]



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