Definition
Philae is the lander of the ESA Rosetta mission which successfully landed on the nucleus of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on November 12, 2014.
Overview
Philae is the first automated vehicle that successfully landed on the nucleus of a comet. It is part of the European mission ROSETTA. Its overall mass is 98 kg including a scientific payload of 27 kg. The name of the lander follows the name of a Nile island where an obelisk was found, whose association with the Rosetta stone helped Champollion to understand the meaning of hieroglyphs.
On November 12, 2014, the Philae lander was released from its mother spacecraft at a distance of about 3 AU from the Sun and 20 km from the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko to land after 7 h of free fall. The landing site (called Agilkia) was meant to be a relatively smooth terrain on the smaller lobe of comet 67P. Contact with the nucleus was reported at 15:34 UTC, but it turned out that the lander did not anchor at the surface and...
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© 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Cottin, H. (2014). Philae Lander. In: Amils, R., et al. Encyclopedia of Astrobiology. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27833-4_1745-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27833-4_1745-4
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Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-27833-4
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Chapter history
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Latest
Philae Lander- Published:
- 28 December 2021
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27833-4_1745-5
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Original
Philae Lander- Published:
- 03 May 2015
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27833-4_1745-4