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With all the science being returned by comet lander Philae, even the brief 'thunk' it made on its first touchdown is giving scientists insights about the comet's surface. Listen in!

Listen to the 'clattery muffled thunk' of the Philae's historic comet touchdown


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    Scott Sutherland
    Meteorologist/Science Writer

    Thursday, November 20, 2014, 11:28 AM -

    Given the nature of space, it's fairly rare when the robotic explorers that we launch into it return sounds for us to listen to, but the Rosetta mission's Philae lander has done just that.

    Last year, NASA's Voyager 1 probe sent back the sounds of interstellar space. The Cassini mission has given us the eerie 'music' produced by the planet Saturn. Rosetta even let us listen in on the 'song' emitting from Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. However, in all of those cases, the spacecraft were recording some other kind of information - magnetic effects, radio waves and other electromagnetic signals - which were converted into sound waves for us to listen to.

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    When comet lander Philae set down on 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, its CASSE instrument (Cometary Acoustic Surface Sounding Experiment) picked up the vibrations of the impact through the comet's surface - which is about as close to true sound as you're going to get in space.

    According to a news release from the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt, or DLR):

                        

    A short but significant 'thud' was heard by the Cometary Acoustic Surface Sounding Experiment (CASSE) as Philae made its first touchdown on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The two-second recording from space is the very first of the contact between a man-made object with a comet upon landing. The CASSE sensors are located in the feet at the base of all three legs of the lander and were active on 12 November 2014 during the descent to the comet.
    "The contact with the surface was short, but we can evaluate the scientific data," says Martin Knapmeyer, a planetary scientist at the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR) and scientific leader of the CASSE Team.
    The signals acquired by the three lander feet are more enlightening for the researchers than might seem for the lay man:
    "The Philae lander came into contact with a soft layer several centimetres thick. Then, just milliseconds later, the feet encountered a hard, perhaps icy layer on 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko," explains DLR researcher Klaus Seidensticker, who is responsible for the Surface Electric Sounding and Acoustic Monitoring Experiment (SESAME), which includes CASSE.

                        

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    Philae is currently asleep on the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, hibernating until the comet gets closer to the Sun, when it will (hopefully) get enough power from its solar panels to wake up and continue its mission.

    Fortunately, though, the 60 hours or so that it lasted after landing were very well-spent, and the ESA team has plenty of data to pore over until then.

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