---
title: "World First Precision Comet Landing"
description: "The Philae probe successfully lands on a comet 310 million miles from Earth, and then falls silent Saturday after finishing experiments due to an apparent loss of power"
date: "2014-11-16"
modified: "2015-08-13"
authors:
  - name: "StefanCretu"
    link: "https://futurism.com/authors/stefancretu"
url: "https://futurism.com/world-first-precision-comet-landing"
categories:
  - "Off-World"
  - "Space"
tags:
  - "space"
---

# World First Precision Comet Landing

![Default Futurism featured image](<https://futurism.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Futurism-Filler-Image.jpg>)

- The probe originally landed only 10 meters away from the calculated landing zone, but a malfunction in the anchoring harpoons caused them to not fire and the probe bounced off the surface
- The probe bounced off the surface of the comet a total of three times before finally landing approximately 1 kilometer away from the calculated landing site
- Mission scientists are looking through NAVCAM images of the comet’s surface to see if they can see where Philae eventually settled