Europe’s Rosetta space probe has located its lost Philae lander, wedged in a “dark crack” on a comet, the European Space Agency said Monday.Rosetta’s camera finally captured images on Friday of the lander on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, weeks before the probe’s own mission ends, the agency said. The photo released by European Space Agency ESA on Monday, Sept. 5, 2016 shows a photo of the comet lander Philae in a crack on the right side of a photo taken by Rosetta's OSIRIS narrow-angle camera on Sept. 2, 2016 from a distance of 2.7 km of the Comet 67P/Churyumov¿Gerasimenko. Philae landed on the comet in November 2014 in what was considered a remarkable feat of precision space travel but the metre-sized, 100 kg (220 lb) probe bounced several times before getting stuck against a cliff wall. While Philae did not have as much time as was hoped for experiments, information it has collected is reshaping thinking about comets and the project has helped in designing future missions. “This wonderful news means that we now have the missing ‘ground-truth’ information needed to put Philae’s three days of science into proper context, now that we know where that ground actually is,” ESA’s Rosetta project scientist, Matt Taylor, said in a statement.
The European Space Agency's robotic lander Philae is discovered wedged in a crack between some rocks in the shadow of a cliff on 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko by the Rosetta space probe after being lost since 2014.