Three touchdowns for Rosetta’s lander

This is an article from ESA's Space Science Portal to summarise Philae's landing so far. For a live summary and latest status update, watch the Google Hangout starting shortly at 13:00 GMT/14:00 CET. After achieving touchdown on a comet for the first time in history, scientists and engineers are busy analysing this new world and the nature of the landing. Touchdown was confirmed at ESA’s Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, Germany at 16:03 GMT/17:03 CET on 12 November. Since then, scientists, flight dynamics specialists and engineers from ESA, the Lander Control Centre in Cologne, Germany, and the Philae Science, Operations and Navigation Centre in Toulouse, France have been studying the first data returned from the lander. These revealed the astonishing conclusion that the lander did not just touch down on Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko once, but three times. The harpoons did not fire and Philae appeared to be rotating after the first touchdown, which indicated that it had lifted from the surface again. Stephan Ulamec, Philae manager at the DLR German Aerospace Center, reported that it touched the surface at 15:34, 17:25 and 17:32 GMT (comet time – it takes over 28 minutes for the signal to reach Earth, via Rosetta). The information was provided by several of the scientific instruments, including the ROMAP magnetic field analyser, the MUPUS thermal mapper, and the sensors in the landing gear that were pushed in on the first impact. The first touchdown was inside the predicted landing ellipse, confirmed using the lander’s downwards-looking ROLIS descent camera in combination with the orbiter’s OSIRIS images to match features. But then the lander lifted from the surface again – for 1 hour 50 minutes. During that time, it travelled about 1 km at a speed of 38 cm/s. It then made a smaller second hop, travelling at about […]



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