Landing on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko

Images taken by the Rosetta spacecraft's OSIRIS imaging system show the portions of the journey its Philae comet lander undertook on Nov. 12, as it approached and then rebounded off the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

The mosaic comprises a series of images captured by OSIRIS's narrow-angle camera over a 30-minute period spanning the first touchdown. From lower left to upper right, the inset images show Philae descending toward, and across, the comet before touchdown. The image taken at 15:43 GMT (7:43 a.m. PST / 9 minutes after Philae first contacted the surface) confirms that the lander was moving east, as first suggested by the data returned by the CONSERT experiment, and at a speed of about 1.1 mph (0.5 meters per second).