http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/06/science/philae-spacecraft-rosetta-comet.html 2016-09-05 19:54:37 No Longer Missing: Rosetta’s Philae Spacecraft Located on Comet Scientists have found the space lander, which disappeared in 2014 after a rough landing on the surface of a comet. === With its legs poking out of a dark crevice on a speeding comet many millions of miles away, the Scientists at the European Space Agency On Sept. 30, the “This remarkable discovery comes at the end of a long, painstaking search,” Patrick Martin, manager of the space agency’s The lander bounced upon impact when a thruster failed to fire, and two harpoons meant to anchor it to the surface did not deploy. Scientists had narrowed its location down to an “area spanning a few tens of meters,” but the images available before Friday were in low resolution, and they showed several objects that might have been the lander. Though its shady, rocky resting spot meant Philae’s solar panels could not get enough sunlight, leading to the rapid depletion of its battery, it was able to complete 60 hours of observation before it went into hibernation In that short time, “This wonderful news means that we now have the missing ‘ground-truth’ information needed to put Philae’s three days of science into proper context, now that we know where that ground actually is,” Matt Taylor, a Rosetta project scientist, said in a statement on Monday.