The European Space Agency (ESA) has released images of the historic event when Philae lander touched down the surface of Comet 67P.
The landing of the Philae marks the first successful landing attempt of a robot on any comet.
The space agency posted the incredible images captured by Rosetta’s NAVCAM on Friday (November 14) while the orbiter continued tracking the intended spot on the comet for the landing of the spacecraft. The images were made available by the Flight Dynamics team.
The images were closely scanned by the readers of the ESA blog. One of the comments on the blog post featuring the photos showed John Broughton confirming that he had spotted the Philae lander on them. Few other readers also pitched into the discussions on the post.
In the photos, the washing-machine sized Philae appears like a shadow of dust when it made the first landing on the comet’s surface and then rebounded back into space after the pair of harpoons that was meant to anchor the craft to the surface failed to fire.
The members of Flight Dynamics team also made careful analysis of the images. In their observation, they revealed great details of Philae captured by the NAVCAM. According to them, the images feature not just the trails of dust but a lot more on the comet.
Gabriele Bellei of Flight Dynamics’ interplanetary division, who had spent hours on the NAVCAM images for finding the evidence of the first robot landing, was the first person to find the Philae in the images.
The Philae Lander is currently kept on a standby mode. It was shut down as it landed at a spot where no sufficient sunlight could be received by it to recharge the batteries. But before it ran out of power after working continuously for its long 60-hour initial battery powered phase, the Rosetta probe managed to send crucial scientific data from the comet surface back to the Earth.