Rosetta mission: What do you do when your landing probe bounces into a crater? It's a crushing blow for the scientists who planned the mission in such painstaking detail. They managed to land the probe with minute-perfect accuracy yesterday afternoon, but the harpoons which should have anchored the lander to the ground failed to fire. Without anything to tether it to the comet's surface, the probe bounced 1km into the air before where it floated for around two hours before making its way back to the surface. Dr Matt Taylor, project scientist for the Rosetta Mission, said scientific instruments on board may need to be repurposed to move the probe into a better position. First they have to find it. They are still not quite sure exactly where it landed. "The first thing to do is nail down exactly where it is," he said. When we get back in contact with Philae hopefully we will be able to use the equipment on board it and Rosetta to triangulate the signals and work out where it is. We are considering using some of the mechanical devices to try get it to move. There is a hammer that we could deploy to try and shift it, and we could always try the harpoons again. That way you could try and make it jump up. At the moment we can't use the drill but I would personally like us to make a last ditched attempt to use it before the power runs out. In the next day or so it's going to run down. We need a lot of luck. But Dr Taylor said he was optimistic that Philae had already sent back crucial data from the comet and claimed the unexpected bounce may bring unanticipated rewards. We've actually got more data than we anticipated because it flew for a couple of hours. We had considered originally bouncing the probe off the comet before landing it for that reason, but abandoned the idea. But a lot of information is coming from Philae and we expect that to continue. It's already been a great success. It was hoped that Philae would operate for three months. The initial internal battery can only last for 60 hours and after that it must rely on solar panels to work. But the scientists estimate that it has landed too close to the cliff wall, which is blocking most of the sunlight. They believe it will get just 90 minutes of direct sunshine a day. A picture taken by the Philae lander of 67P/CG as it descends onto the surface of the comet (Reuters) Scientists are also facing the worry that Philae is still not properly attached to the surface. Until the lander is secure it could be difficult to use the instruments on board. Prof Tom Marsh, lead of the University of Warwick's Astronomy and Astrophysics group, said: "The most important issue facing Philae now is the lack of a secure fix to the surface. The lack of a secure fix will make it much harder to penetrate the surface with the drill for instance: it may simply cause Philae to rise off the surface. Firing the harpoons is not necessarily a good idea because that too could cause Philae to move (the same effect as the recoil from a gun), and if it positioned on a steep slope, this would endanger the mission. Exciting but uncertain times! A panorama which was released on Thursday showed that the probe is surrounded by rocky outcrops and darkness. They are the first pictures ever taken on a comet. "You see something that man built, a lander, and something that nature built 4.6 billion years ago, containing all the mystery that we are trying to look at,"Jean Pierre Bibring, Philae Lead Scientist told a press briefing on Thursday as he revealed the images for the first time. The first panoramic image from the surface of a comet (EPA) We see like a huge cliff ahead of us. We are just in the shadow of a cliff and that is part of the problem. There is very little light here. It's a wall about 1m away of the lander. We thought we would land in a highly powdered material. But it's like a rock. It's not a powder. This material is like a trampoline. Dr Bibring said that when they made contact with Philae they would try to reorientate the panels to pick up more sunlight. The team first spotted something was wrong after signals from Philae suggested that the probe was still rotating after touchdown. With sinking hearts they realised that the probe was still in the air, having bounced after hitting the surface. The rotation did not stop for another two hours, by which time Philae was hundreds of metres off target. "Unfortunately this is not the situation we were hoping for," admitted a spokesman for the Philae team. The Rosetta mission is scheduled to last until December 2015, four months after the comet has made its closest approach to the Sun and started to head back out to the more distant reaches of the solar system. The cross shows where Philae should have landed, and the box where it probably did (ESA) Despite the setback the science community has continued to herald the mission as a complete success. Dr Daniel Brown, an astronomy expert at Nottingham Trent University, said: "Philae has been on the comet for just one day, but the sense of tension and awe it has created has been remarkable. The amount of emotion we have seen from the team since the landing shows that science does not come from the head alone, but from the heart and soul too. Space and planetary exploration is touching the very core of what we are about, challenging the impossible and shedding light on the unknown. One look at the images sent back from Rosetta and Philae confirm this. On Thursday, Professor Akiva Bar-Nun of Tel Aviv University's Department of Geosciences revealed that it was the appearence of Halley's Comet in 1986 that inspired the Rosetta Mission. "The ESA's Giotto spacecraft passed by Halley, but remained more than 600 miles away from it," he said. So a group of us, scientists from the US and Europe, got together to design a spacecraft that would not pass by a comet -- but would instead fly with the comet and bring samples of its ice back to Earth.