I’m sure you’ve heard, but humans landed a probe on a comet yesterday for the first time. The probe and its “mothership,” Philae and Rosetta, took ten years to travel the 300 million miles to the comet and then had to spend time orbiting it to find a good place for Philae to land. (You can watch a really charming video about the lead up to the landing here–I can’t embed it but it’s really worth a click.)
Philae’s harpoons to keep it anchored to the comet failed to deploy, which is a concern since tere’s hardly any gravity on the comet, but still: We have a scientific probe on a comet about the size of a mountain that is 300 million miles away. I think this xkcd comic sums it up:
