Brid-Aine,
I'm in a meeting when it's scheduled to land, can you ask them to postpone it for an hour?
Thanks.
The ESA's comet probe Philae has been given the first official nod in its historic attempt to land on Comet 67P: boffins at the European Space Agency say the lander's Rosetta mothercraft is on the right path towards the soaring cosmic rock. The agency's European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) Flight Dynamics staff had to …
"The lander is harpooning the rock and then, once on the surface, drilling into it."
Yes. That's ruined some good SciFi. Everyone knows that comets are just big dustballs or collections of rock and ice boulders that a spaceship can carefully manoeuvre into to collect samples, mine or "hitch" a ride. They are NOT supposed to look this solid. We need more missions like this to find the "proper" comets. See, for example, Into The Comet, Arthur C. Clarke
This post has been deleted by its author