Missing Philae Lander Found on Comet Two Years Later, ESA Says

The lander is wedged into a dark crack in a region called Abydos, on the smaller lobe of the lumpy comet.

The washing machine sized comet lander Philae has been located lying upside down in a ditch on comet 67/P 682 million kilometres (424 million miles) from Earth.

“With only a month left of the Rosetta mission, we are so happy to have finally imaged Philae, and to see it in such fantastic detail”, says Cecilia Tubiana of the OSIRIS camera team, the first person to see the images when they were downlinked from Rosetta yesterday. Instead, Philae struck the comet and bounced at least twice.

The Philae lander was the first man-made object to land on a comet in November 2014.

While Philae did not have as much time as was hoped for experiments, information it has collected has already helped reshape scientists’ understanding of comets and their role in the early universe. But Rosetta is the first mission to actually catch dusty organic particles escaping the surface of such a body, affording scientists a detailed look at their composition. “For many people it is a huge emotional closure, but for the scientists it is incredibly important because it now tells us where the measurements were taken that we made with Philae back in 2014 – that context is everything”, Mark McCaughrean, senior scientific adviser at ESA said in a statement.

The image also shows why communicating with the lander has proven to be so hard, being situated right next to several boulders. Based on the image by Rosetta, the lander is on its side with two legs visible in the photo.

Fully analyzing the data from Rosetta and Philae is expected to keep researchers busy for years. In addition to having a faulty thruster, the lander failed to fire the harpoons that would have locked it to the surface of the comet.

During Rosetta’s observation, it has detected some complex organic molecules in the dust grains surrounding the comet.

We may think hunting for a set of lost vehicle keys is a tragic event but consider the distressing circumstances of losing your pricey astro lander on a streaking outer space comet.

“This remarkable discovery comes at the end of a long, painstaking search”, Rosetta mission manager Patrick Martin said in the release. “It is incredible we have captured this at the final hour”.