# This is your Astronomy Tonight podcast.

Good evening, stargazers! It's November 12th, and we've got a cosmic milestone to celebrate from the annals of space exploration history.

On this date in 2014, the European Space Agency's absolutely *bonkers* Rosetta spacecraft did something that had never been done before in human history—it successfully **landed a robotic probe on a comet**. We're talking about the Philae lander touching down on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, a dusty space snowball hurtling through the void at 40,000 miles per hour!

Now, imagine trying to land a spacecraft on an object that's roughly the size of a mountain, spinning through space, with barely any gravity to speak of. Philae used harpoons and ice screws to try to anchor itself to the comet's surface—talk about bringing the right tools to the job! While the landing was a bit bumpier than expected (the probe actually bounced around before settling), Philae managed to transmit crucial data about the comet's composition back to Earth, helping us understand the chemical building blocks of our solar system.

This mission gave us our first close-up look at a comet's surface and fundamentally changed how we understand these icy wanderers from the outer reaches of our cosmic neighborhood.

So be sure to **subscribe to the Astronomy Tonight podcast** for more cosmic stories like this! Want more information? Check out **Quiet Please dot AI**, and thank you for listening to another Quiet Please Production!

This content was created in partnership and with the help of Artificial Intelligence AI