Mission scientist reacts to historic first images from the surface of a comet

Research teams across Europe spent the last half-year meticulously going through a wish list of experiments for the Philae comet lander without knowing whether they would ever get a chance to execute the tasks.

The European Space Agency’s $1.6 billion Rosetta spacecraft closed in Thursday for a deliberate crash landing on the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko early Friday, a slow-motion kamikaze plunge to bring the enormously successful mission to an end after more than two years of unprecedented close-range observations.

The lander project manager Stephan Ulamec says tremendous science has been collected during Philae’s short time on the surface but battery life is now limited and it is unlikely to last much longer.