space conquest

Rosetta represents not only the first attempt at a soft-landing onto the surface of a comet, but also the first time they will get a chance to touch and and taste one of these ancient objects believed to be remnants from the time the solar system was born.

The anchoring harpoons did not fire, and so they are not anchoring the lander to the surface.
"We still do not fully understand what has happened."

The Rosetta spacecraft and its Philae lander have a lot to teach scientists about what Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko looks like, is composed of, and even what it smells like, but what does the comet sound like? The day before Philae made history by landing on the surface of the comet, ESA released an audio clip of 67P/C-G singing. Unfortunately, its song is creepy as hell and sounds a lot like Predator, the alien that tried to kill Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Of course, sound waves can’t travel through space, so it isn’t a direct audio recording. Instead, Rosetta’s Plasma Consortium (RPC) picked up variations in the magnetic field around the comet, due to interactions between 67P/C-G’s coma and the plasma from the Sun, better known as solar wind. These variations resulted in frequencies between 40 to 50 millihertz, about 10,000 times lower than can be detected by humans. ESA scientists altered the frequency of the comet’s song into human hearing range, and discovered it was a series of clicks that are very reminiscent of Predator’s growl.

The comet seems to be emitting a ‘song’ in the form of oscillations in the magnetic field in the comet’s environment. It is being sung at 40-50 millihertz, far below human hearing, which typically picks up sound between 20 Hz and 20 kHz. To make the music audible to the human ear, the frequencies have been increased by a factor of about 10,000.