Very very cool.
Pics or it did’nt happen. 
Amazing.
Suck it, dolphins.
Primates rule, cetaceans drool.
.
Well, that made me cry. One of the most amazing things I’ve witnessed.
Yeah, science!
An incredible achievement. Huge congratulations to ESA!
I have the same happy feeling as when Curiosity landed on Mars!
The Telegraph article says that it’s “a mission which could reveal the origins of life on Earth.” That sounds like hyperbolic horseshit. Isn’t the mission interesting enough as it is?
uh oh… harpoons didn’t shoot.
He did say something about sending a re-try command, but yeah - not being anchored would interfere with a lot of the planned experiments, I think.
It seems like every single space program/mission ever includes that line.
Well it could, just as it could reveal where the Loch Ness monster goes for ski holidays to beat the crowds.
Crap.
As if there’ll be one mission that’ll explain it all.
I hope they work out the harpoon issue though. Maybe they should’ve named the lander Ahab.
It still has the screws in its feet, right? Hopefully those will help keep it anchored.
Lake Tahoe, mid-November,—everyone knows that.
I totally misunderstood what was going on here. I was under the impression that harpoons were being launched from the orbiter and the lander would essentially climb down the cables so it wouldn’t bounce off the comet (it’s got a really low escape velocity, like 1mph). The XKCD graphic didn’t help with this misunderstanding.
So when someone said the harpoons didn’t fire, I was confused since we already have confirmation that it landed and I head them say we’ll have pictures back in the next hour or so.
Anyways, harpoons seems like an odd thing to call it when your launching them from, what, a few feet away right into the ground. Also, I wonder why they’d do that, and then they’re going to use drills too. I supposed the concern is that the module isn’t heavy enough to push the drills into the ground and it’ll just skip around with the cable from the harpoons pulling it down.
The comet is about 3.6 au away, so according to my calculations, that’s a 30 minute, one-way trip in giving commands, and another 30 min trip to find out if it worked. Yes?
Yes, there’s a 30 minute delay each way.
On the harpoon comment: quick Wiki info:
The lander, named Philae, will approach Churyumov–Gerasimenko at relative speed around 1 m/s (2.2 mph; 3.6 km/h) and on contact with the surface, two harpoons will be fired into the comet to prevent the lander from bouncing off because the comet’s escape velocity is only around 0.5 m/s (1.1 mph; 1.8 km/h). Additional drills are used to further secure the lander on the comet. After its attachment to the comet, the lander will begin its science mission.