Philae Has Landed!
Though the active descent system failed, Philae has successfully landed on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. So, though the future of space exploration looks grim, today we have some reason to celebrate. Today, for the first time, humanity has a probe operating on the surface of a comet. Granted, I’m not sure such a project would have been approved these days anymore, but we’re talking about something that began being planned in 1993 and a launch that took place back in 2004. These days, I doubt they’d even dare to dream of such things anymore, and even if some still would, they’d quickly find that such plans can no longer be anything other than dreams.
It was a crazy idea; finding a comet, catching up to it, entering orbit around such a small celestial body that also changes as it approaches perihelion, having the orbiter drop a lander at pretty much walking pace and then having that lander latch on to the comet using harpoons, somehow avoiding bouncing or propelling itself back up while doing so despite the comet’s extremely weak gravity making it weigh roughly one gram and the escape velocity being of only around one meter per second. Of course, that thruster was there just to avoid such a scenario, and the fact that it apparently failed left absolutely no room for error and made the landing be to a significant extent a matter of luck, as any irregularity in the landing spot would have made latching on impossible without the thruster… But apparently another failure made that no longer be an issue for the Rosetta team at this point.
Unfortunately, I’m saying that because, just as I was finishing writing the above paragraph, I heard that, while Philae had a softer landing than expected and therefore didn’t quite fly away on its own, the anchors failed as well. As such, the lander is not anchored to the comet, which is quite a problem considering the extremely weak gravity and the fact that the comet will be increasingly active. It would appear that the team is trying to decide whether they should try activating the anchors once again or that’s too much of a risk, so there are problems and the mission may still fail completely if Philae begins to slide or bounce away, but at this very moment it is standing still on the surface of the comet and, at least according to the information released so far, its instruments appear to be operating normally.
