Philae landed on a comet and Bruce Willis wasn’t involved

You may not have been following Philae’s Twitter feed for the last few months but you probably saw the news that the European Space Agency’s probe has landed on a comet designated 67P yesterday.

Touchdown! My new address: 67P! #CometLanding

— Philae Lander (@Philae2014) November 12, 2014

This is a tremendous achievement:

Jason Snell wrote a short post titled “Philae lands on a comet” commemorating the landing and I think he captured the achievement nicely in these words:

Space is immense and we are very small. What we think of as the world is a thin skin of cool surface above a hot, molten blob, all wrapped in an incredibly thin shell of atmosphere that keeps us alive.

And yet we built a machine that flew 30 light minutes away, launched a probe, and attached it to a chunk of debris that’s been bobbing around since the dawn of the solar system.

Pretty cool.

Here is a photo of the comet on approach, just before Philae landed on 67P. The comet is apparently shaped like a duck!

You can follow Philae’s progress on Twitter:

Tweets by @Philae2014