Bouncing Philae: Comet Lander May be in Trouble

New data from the European Space Agency's (ESA) historic Philae landing on the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko has revealed that the tiny craft didn't just touchdown, it bounced, skating the surface of the rotating comet to settle pretty far away from where experts had hoped it would land.

When the touchdown signal from Philae was sent and confirmed on Nov. 12, the lander's instruments reportedly began to "think" that the craft had settled, booting up and starting a phase of passive analytic experiments.

However, expert interpretation of that data has revealed that Philae was still moving after it first hit the surface of the comet. It then bounced, skating over the cold and dusty surface of 67P for nearly two hours. It traveled about 3,300 feet (1 km) in that time. A second smaller hop at 17:32 GMT (comet time - it takes over 28 minutes for the signal to reach Earth, via Rosetta) carried it another 40 feet, where it finally settled.

This all occurred because the lander was unsuccessful in deploying its anchoring harpoons during its decent from the Rosetta comet-chasing spacecraft.

And although the Rosetta and Philae teams expressed their sheer joy that Philae had made it at all, especially considering the harpoon troubles, it now appears that the lander's unexpected bouncing has placed it in a bit of a pickle. (Scroll to read on...)

But that appears to be what the Philae team is banking on the most. Stephan Ulamec, the Philae mission manager, told reporters that he hopes the drilling will rotate the unsecured lander so that more solar panels will be exposed to the Sun before its primary battery is exhausted.

"We'll have a slightly larger panel [exposed] and this would increase the chance that at a later stage the lander could wake up again and start talking to us again," Ulamec said in an online briefing.

All is Not Lost

Despite this disappointing news and the difficulties to come, the ESA team still appears exuberant about the success of the Rosetta mission and Philae landing, during which any number of far more catastrophic problems could have occurred in the course of chasing down and then orbiting the comet 67P.

"We harnessed whole planets and their gravity to chase down the comet," Aidan Gillen said in the ESA's short film Ambition. "So many things could have gone wrong... So many unknowns... We may as well have been shooting [Rosetta] from a slingshot."

And yet here we are, with a spacecraft orbiting a comet and a robot on its surface for the first time ever. The first panoramas of Philae's stunning surroundings have even already come in, with more to come.

"We're going to be grinding our nails down waiting for the next [Philae] signal... but now we can look forward and do the science," Rosetta Project scientist Matt Taylor said during their briefing.

"We've got a year of this," he said with a chuckle. "Brilliant."

** UPDATE: Philae in the Dark but Doing Better **