Philae lander sends back first picture taken on a f**king comet

I’ll give humanity this. Every once in a while it does something impressive. While our governments are stripping down our rights and crushing us under their boots, every once in a while fleeting agencies within these rotting, antiquates corpses have found the time to pull off something sublime. Like the definition of sublime. Sending back a fucking image. From a comet.

NASA:

The Philae lander of the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission is safely on the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, as these first two images from the lander’s CIVA camera confirm. One of the lander’s three feet can be seen in the foreground. The view is a two-image mosaic taken on Nov. 12, 2014.

The lander separated from the orbiter at 09:03 UTC (1:03 a.m. PST) for touch down on comet 67P seven hours later.

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.