I’ve been following the Rosetta mission with interest, and today it has reached its peak as the main Rosetta probe discharged a smaller probe – Philae – to land on the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
The picture here (courtesy of ESA) is good enough – it shows Philae shortly after it was released by Rosetta to start its descent. Just imagine that this is happening around 500 million km away (it takes half an hour for the signals to reach Earth).
Some of the other images of the comet itself sent back by Rosetta have been incredible for their detail.
The mission overall has been impressive by virtue of the fact that Rosetta has bounced around the solar system for 10 years picking up speed and chasing down the comet, finally meeting up with it in August this year. The probe has travelled somewhere above 4 billion miles in total, and caught up with an object travelling at around 34,000mph and a third of a billion miles away!
And incredibly, after all that, Philae has successfully landed as of just after 4pm GMT on 12 November 2014! Well, half an hour before that, allowing for the signal transit time.
This really is an historic occasion (and I remember watching the moon landings when I was a child).