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ESA’s Rosetta Mission Makes Historic Landing On Comet
In a journey more than a decade in the making, the European Space Agency has confirmed its Rosetta mission successfully landed its Philae probe on the surface of a comet on Wednesday.
The ESA’s Philae probe made touchdown on comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko at 11:03 a.m. EST on Wednesday, making history as the first spacecraft to achieve a soft-landing on the surface of a comet. While NASA’s Deep Impact, released a probe to collide with a comet as a part of its scientific observations in 2005, no mission has accomplished a controlled soft-landing on a comet’s nucleus before.
“Our ambitious Rosetta mission has secured a place in the history books: not only is it the first to rendezvous with and orbit a comet, but it is now also the first to deliver a lander to a comet’s surface,” ESA’s Director General Jean-Jacques Dordain said.
[WATCH LIVE: Webcasts Of The European Space Agency’s Philae Probe Landing On A Comet]
The ESA launched its Rosetta spacecraft on March 2, 2004 on an ambitious mission to orbit and then deploy a probe to the surface of a comet, in feats never before accomplished by a spacecraft. Rosetta became the first spacecraft to rendezvous with and orbit a comet on August 6, 2014.
The goal of the Rosetta mission is to provide the most detailed observations of a comet to date in order to better understand the composition of a comet’s nucleus and the changes it undergoes as it passes by the sun. Comets, icy remnants left over from the dawn of our solar system, could provide clues as to the conditions that existed 4.6 billion years ago.
[WATCH: Game Of Thrones’ Aidan Gillen Appears In Sci-Fi Short Film About ESA’s Rosetta Mission]
Read more: http://www.penny4nasa.org/2014/11/12/european-rosetta-mission-makes-historic-comet-landing/
The Philae lander has separated from the Rosetta orbiter, and is now on its way to becoming the first spacecraft to touch down on a comet.
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