Here's what you see when you bounce off a comet. This blurry picture, the first image snapped by the European Space Agency's Philae lander after its touchdown on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in November, was one of the initial warning signs that things hadn't gone as planned.
Philae was travelling at around 3 kilometres an hour when it hit the surface of the comet, but the harpoons and thruster designed to anchor it to the landing spot failed and it bounced a kilometre into the air. The probe came back down around two hours later and after a second, shorter bounce it came to rest in the shadow of a cliff. The team are now calling it "Perihelion Cliff", and it is shown above in an overexposed version of a previously released image.
These two images from Philae's CIVA camera were presented yesterday at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, California, by lead Philae scientist Jean-Pierre Bibring. He is confident that sunlight will creep over Perihelion Cliff as comet 67P moves closer to the sun, eventually reviving the sleeping probe.
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