Rosetta & Philae

[Al Skierkiewicz]

I am surprised that no one has started something on this achievement so here goes.
I think that this is one of the most important achievements of recent history. Humans have landed a spacecraft on a foreign body traveling through the solar system at astonishing speed and with such a small gravitational field it produced the kind of problems we find every year in our games.
Reading this morning, the gravitational field of a 4 kM object makes the lander's 200 lb weight equivalent to about 1/30 of an ounce. This required the lander to screw itself into the surface of the comet to hold on. The comet is currently traveling about 23 miles/sec and is 315 million miles from earth. Imagine that! A ship traveling for more than ten years, catches up with an object traveling at 88,00 miles per hour, over 300 milllion miles from Earth and then was able to land on that moving object. Add to that, an unknown surface, temperatures of -70 on the surface and gas escaping constantly in the solar wind.
I can't think of anything but "cool"!