First Panoramic View from Comet Lander

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Caption:

The Philae lander of the European Space Agency's Rosetta mission has returned the first panoramic image from the surface of a comet. The unprocessed image, as captured by the lander's CIVA-P imaging system, shows a 360-degree view around the point of final touchdown. The three feet of Philae's landing gear can be seen in some of the frames.

Confirmation of Philae's touchdown on the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko arrived on Earth at 16:03 UTC (8:03 a.m. PST) on 12 November.

Rosetta and Philae had been riding through space together for more than 10 years. Philae is the first probe to achieve soft landing on a comet, and Rosetta is the first to rendezvous with a comet and follow it around the sun. The information collected by Philae at one location on the surface will complement that collected by the Rosetta orbiter for the entire comet.

Background Info:

Rosetta is a European Space Agency mission with contributions from its member states and NASA. Rosetta's Philae lander is provided by a consortium led by the German Aerospace Center, Cologne; Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Gottingen; French National Space Agency, Paris; and the Italian Space Agency, Rome. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, manages the U.S. participation in the Rosetta mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Rosetta carries three NASA instruments in its 21-instrument payload.

For more information on the U.S. instruments aboard Rosetta, visit http://rosetta.jpl.nasa.gov .

More information about Rosetta is available at http://www.esa.int/rosetta .

For publicly released image use, see ESA's Copyright Notice Images .

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