The European Space Agency's Rosetta team published a series of images on Monday that show the Philae lander's fateful journey across Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko on Nov. 12, 2014.
The photos capture the last 30-minutes of the lander's ten-year journey, as seen by Rosetta’s OSIRIS narrow-angle camera when it was roughly 10 miles above the surface of the comet.
"From left to right, the images show Philae descending towards and across the comet before touchdown," the ESA's Emily Baldwin writes in a blog post accompanying the images. "The image taken after touchdown, at 15:43 GMT, confirms that the lander was moving east, as first suggested by the data returned by the CONSERT experiment, and at a speed of about 0.5 m/s."
The photos seem to confirm what scientists initially had feared -- that not only had Philae unexpectedly bounced twice before coming to rest untethered to the surface, but photos indicated it was next to a cliff that largely blocked sunlight from reaching two of its three solar panels.
Despite the rough landing, Philae still completed its primary mission -- landing on an icy comet and transmitting loads of data back to Earth.
.@philae2014 + his shadow visible in my NAVCAM images from first touchdown! http://t.co/sFgzM3xa1f #CometLanding http://t.co/ZS3yrpA1VW— ESA Rosetta Mission (@ESA_Rosetta) November 16, 2014
"The data collected by Philae and Rosetta is set to make this mission a game-changer in cometary science," Matt Taylor, ESA's Rosetta project scientist, said on the mission's blog.
Additional reporting by the Associated Press.