More than four years after the end of ESA’s Rosetta mission, the researchers have now found out exactly where the Philae 2004 touched down the second time with his hops on the surface. From the way the probe scratched the ground, they can now better deduce what the comet looks like. The exposed four and a half billion year old ice is therefore even more fluffy than the milk foam on a cappuccino, explain scientists from the German Aerospace Center (DLR). In addition, the ice spot in the pictures is reminiscent of the outline of a skull, according to Halloween.

New finds after years The European Space Agency’s Rosetta probe was 2004 and then ten years to your comet 67 P / Churyumov-Gerasimenko on the way. Orbited it and explored it 2004 and also exposed Philae. The lander reached the surface, but only after several hops because the hold-on mechanism did not work. Philae remained lying in the shade and his energy reserves were sufficient for 60 Hours of taking loads of measurements and sending data back to Earth. Then it was deactivated. It wasn’t until almost two years later that the researchers found its location. And now they also know how exactly he got there. Rosetta itself said goodbye 2014 and had also landed on the comet. Since then there have been no more new data from the comet, but the old ones still provide information.

As the researchers now in the science magazine Nature explain, they succeeded in the late discovery based on data from the ROMAP magnetometer at the Technical University of Braunschweig. The data it gathered had changed when an antenna was bent during the second landing. The researchers were able to estimate how long the probe had penetrated the ice and also determine the precise orientation of the lander. According to this, Philae was on the surface for almost two minutes after the first jump and scratched it before he slowly jumped on in the very low gravity. With this data they were able to localize the place of this touchdown on the images of the high-resolution OSIRIS camera.

Softer than milk foam All in all, the lander has scraped free the pure water ice that is hidden under the dark surface on an area of ​​around three and a half square meters. The data collected during the hop therefore also reveal that the mixture of this ice dust is extremely soft.

The mechanical tension with which the material is held together is therefore only 09 Pascal: “That’s not much more than nothing,” says Jean -Baptiste Vincent from DLR. The rock that Philae touched consists of three quarters of cavities and is more comparable to Styrofoam rocks in a film set. This knowledge is also valuable for future missions to comets.

Search images with Philae (9 images) Under The photos released include those taken by the OSIRIS camera during the Philaes landing and showing the lander. Here is the first one (resolution further back) – best in zoom.

(Image: ESA / Rosetta / MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS / UPD / LAM / IAA / SSO / INTA / UPM / DASP / IDA) Comet images from ESA – Rosetta space probe (19 images)
A – quite majestic – view of the landing zone.

(Image: ESA / Rosetta / NAVCAM – CC BY-SA IGO 3.0 / creativecommons.org / licenses / by-sa / 3.0 / igo /) (mho) 13901