The European Space Agency on Thursday published the first image taken from the surface of a comet and said that its Philae lander is still “stable” despite a failure to latch on properly to the rocky terrain.
The lander scored a historic first Wednesday, touching down on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko after a decade-long, 6.4 billion-kilometer (4 billion-mile) journey through space aboard its mother ship Rosetta.
Scientists’ jubilation was slightly dampened because the harpoons which were meant to anchor the lander to the surface failed to deploy, causing it to bounce twice before it came to rest on the comet’s 4 kilometer-wide body, or nucleus.
“Philae is stable, sitting on the nucleus and is producing data,” Gerhard Schwehm, a scientist on the Rosetta mission, told The Associated Press. “The lander is very healthy.”