Three touchdowns for Rosetta’s lander

14 November 2014 - After achieving touchdown on a comet for the first time in history, scientists and engineers are busy analysing this new world and the nature of the landing. Touchdown was confirmed at ESA's Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, Germany at 16:03 GMT/17:03 CET on 12 November. Since then, scientists, flight dynamics specialists and engineers from ESA, the Lander Control Centre in Cologne, Germany, and the Philae Science, Operations and Navigation Centre in Toulouse, France have been studying the first data returned from the lander. These revealed the astonishing conclusion that the lander did not just touch down on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko once, but three times. The harpoons did not fire and Philae appeared to be rotating after the first touchdown, which indicated that it had lifted from the surface again. Stephan Ulamec, Philae manager at the DLR German Aerospace Center, reported that it touched the surface at 15:34, 17:25 and 17:32 GMT (comet time - it takes over 28 minutes for the signal to reach Earth, via Rosetta). The information was provided by several of the scientific instruments, including the ROMAP magnetic field analyser, the MUPUS thermal mapper, and the sensors in the landing gear that were pushed in on the first impact.