"Europe's Rosetta mission pulled off the first-ever soft landing on a comet Wednesday thanks to a lot of great engineering and hard work — along with a healthy dose of luck, mission scientists say. Rosetta's Philae lander successfully touched down on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko early Wednesday morning (Nov. 12), more than 300 million miles (483 million kilometers) from Earth. But Philae's anchoring harpoons didn't fire as planned, and the 220-lb. (100 kilograms) probe bounced off the comet twice before settling onto its icy surface for good." - Mark H

"Philae's first bounce off 67P was a big one, sending the lander about 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) above the comet's surface, Ulamec said. Philae eventually came down again 1 hour and 50 minutes later, likely about 0.6 miles away from the original landing site. (The team still isn't sure exactly where the lander ended up.) But the probe was nearly lost to space. It rebounded off 67P's surface at 0.85 mph (1.37 km/h); with a bounce of about 1 mph (1 km/h), Philae would have escaped the comet's minuscule gravity altogether, said Peter Schultz, a geoscientist at Brown University in Rhode Island." - Mark H