We’re sure most of us have seen Star Wars and remember that scene in the Trench Run with Luke Skywalker. He had to fire a shot while flying which didn’t too hard, except that it had to be an extremely precise shot and it was an all or nothing kind of situation. Well something similar has happened in real life, except that instead of trying to take down the Death Star, the European Space Agency’s Philae spacecraft had successfully landed on a comet.
The landing time reportedly took a nerve-wrecking 7 hours as this would essentially be the first time that a spacecraft from Earth has landed on the surface of a comet that has been hurtling through deep space, which will undoubtedly give us a lot of information from its surface that we might not have had before.
Stephan Ulamec, Philae lander manager at the DLR German space centre cheered, “We are there. We are sitting on the surface. Philae is talking to us. We are on the comet.” However as it stands, it seems that mission control is a bit worried that the spacecraft’s harpoons did not fasten properly and anchor itself onto the comet, which is something they are trying to figure out now.
The landing of the Philae will monitor the Comet 67P/C-G from the surface as the Rosetta spacecraft orbits the comet while investigating the comet from above. The scientists are hoping that the Philae will be able to remain in place until March 2015, all the while collecting and transmitting data back to Earth.
This is important research as it is believed that comets were responsible for bringing water to Earth. According to Stanley Cowley, a planetary scientist at the University of Leicester in England, “Comet impacts are thought to have been one of the principal means by which water was delivered to the early Earth, around 3.6 billion years ago, possibly contributing half the water in our oceans.”
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