{"id":9884,"date":"2016-09-06T05:50:51","date_gmt":"2016-09-06T05:50:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revoscience.com\/en\/?p=9884"},"modified":"2016-09-06T05:50:51","modified_gmt":"2016-09-06T05:50:51","slug":"rosetta","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/rosetta\/","title":{"rendered":"Rosetta"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Philae<\/a>
Philae found<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Less than a month before the end of the mission, Rosetta\u2019s high-resolution camera has revealed the Philae lander wedged into a dark crack on Comet 67P\/Churyumov\u2013Gerasimenko.<\/span><\/p>\n

The images were taken on 2 September by the OSIRIS narrow-angle camera as the orbiter came within 2.7 km of the surface and clearly show the main body of the lander, along with two of its three legs.<\/span><\/p>\n

The images also provide proof of Philae\u2019s orientation, making it clear why establishing communications was so difficult following its landing on 12 November 2014.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Philae<\/a>
Philae close-up<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cWith only a month left of the Rosetta mission, we are so happy to have finally imaged Philae, and to see it in such amazing detail,\u201d says Cecilia Tubiana of the OSIRIS camera team, the first person to see the images when they were downlinked from Rosetta yesterday.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAfter months of work, with the focus and the evidence pointing more and more to this lander candidate, I\u2019m very excited and thrilled that we finally have this all-important picture of Philae sitting in Abydos,\u201d says ESA\u2019s Laurence O\u2019Rourke, who has been coordinating the search efforts over the last months at ESA, with the OSIRIS and Lander Science Operations and Navigation Center (SONC, CNES) teams.<\/span><\/p>\n

Philae was last seen when it first touched down at Agilkia, bounced and then flew for another two hours before ending up at a location later named Abydos, on the comet\u2019s smaller lobe.<\/span><\/p>\n

After three days, Philae’s primary battery was exhausted and the lander went into hibernation, only to wake up again and communicate briefly with Rosetta in June and July 2015 as the comet came closer to the Sun and more power was available.<\/span><\/p>\n

However, until today, the precise location was not known. Radio ranging data tied its location down to an area spanning a few tens of metres, but a number of\u00a0potential candidate objects<\/span><\/a>\u00a0identified in relatively low-resolution images taken from larger distances could not be analysed in detail until recently.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Philae<\/a>
Philae close-up, labelled<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

While most candidates could be discarded from analysis of the imagery and other techniques, evidence continued to build towards\u00a0one particular target<\/span><\/a>, which is now confirmed in images taken unprecedentedly close to the surface of the comet.<\/span><\/p>\n

At 2.7 km, the resolution of the OSIRIS narrow-angle camera is about 5 cm\/pixel, sufficient to reveal characteristic features of Philae\u2019s 1 m-sized body and its legs, as seen in these definitive pictures.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThis remarkable discovery comes at the end of a long, painstaking search,\u201d says Patrick Martin, ESA\u2019s Rosetta Mission Manager. \u201cWe were beginning to think that Philae would remain lost forever. It is incredible we have captured this at the final hour.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThis wonderful news means that we now have the missing \u2018ground-truth\u2019 information needed to put Philae\u2019s three days of science into proper context, now that we know where that ground actually is!\u201d says Matt Taylor, ESA\u2019s Rosetta project scientist.<\/span><\/p>\n

“Now that the lander search is finished we feel ready for Rosetta’s landing, and look forward to capturing even closer images of Rosetta’s touchdown site,\u201d adds Holger Sierks, principal investigator of the OSIRIS camera.<\/span><\/p>\n

The discovery comes less than a month before\u00a0Rosetta descends to the comet\u2019s surface<\/span><\/a>. On 30 September, the orbiter will be sent on a final one-way mission to investigate the comet from close up, including the open pits in the Ma\u2019at region, where it is hoped that critical observations will help to reveal secrets of the body\u2019s interior structure.<\/span><\/p>\n

Further information on the search that led to the discovery of Philae, along with additional images, will be made available soon.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cAfter months of work, with the focus and the evidence pointing more and more to this lander candidate, I\u2019m very excited and thrilled that we finally have this all-important picture of Philae sitting in Abydos,\u201d says ESA\u2019s Laurence O\u2019Rourke, who has been coordinating the search efforts over the last months at ESA, with the OSIRIS and Lander Science Operations and Navigation Center (SONC, CNES) teams.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":9885,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9884","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-space-news"],"featured_image_urls":{"full":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/Philae_found_large.jpg",625,391,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/Philae_found_large-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/Philae_found_large-300x187.jpg",300,187,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/Philae_found_large.jpg",625,391,false],"large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/Philae_found_large.jpg",625,391,false],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/Philae_found_large.jpg",625,391,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/Philae_found_large.jpg",625,391,false],"ultp_layout_landscape_large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/Philae_found_large.jpg",625,391,false],"ultp_layout_landscape":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/Philae_found_large.jpg",625,391,false],"ultp_layout_portrait":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/Philae_found_large.jpg",600,375,false],"ultp_layout_square":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/Philae_found_large.jpg",600,375,false],"newspaper-x-single-post":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/Philae_found_large.jpg",625,391,false],"newspaper-x-recent-post-big":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/Philae_found_large.jpg",550,344,false],"newspaper-x-recent-post-list-image":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/Philae_found_large.jpg",95,59,false],"web-stories-poster-portrait":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/Philae_found_large.jpg",625,391,false],"web-stories-publisher-logo":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/Philae_found_large.jpg",96,60,false],"web-stories-thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/Philae_found_large.jpg",150,94,false]},"author_info":{"info":["Amrita Tuladhar"]},"category_info":"Space\/ AstroPhysics<\/a>","tag_info":"Space\/ AstroPhysics","comment_count":"0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9884","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9884"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9884\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9885"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}