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The European Space Agency says harpoons designed to anchor the Philae probe failed to deploy during its landing on the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on Wednesday (November 12), but that the lander appears stable on the surface.
At a news conference on Thursday, Stefan Ulamec, Philae lander manager at the DLR German Aerospace Center, told reporters that his team was still investigating the cause.
The 100-kg (220-pound) lander - virtually weightless on the comet's surface - touched down on schedule at about 11 a.m. ET after a seven-hour descent from its orbiting mothership Rosetta, now located a half-billion kilometers (300 million miles) from Earth. Despite the technical problem, pictures beamed half a billion kilometres (300 million miles) back to Earth showed the probe sitting on the surface of the comet.
Ulamec said the fact that the landing worked, despite the anchoring problems, shows "the high redundancy we put into the d
