We landed a robot on a space snowball and it sang us the secrets of life itself.
It was November 12, 2014, at 5:03pm. Humanity had just accomplished a feat that will forever mark its history. Philae, the miniature laboratory integrated into the Rosetta probe, landed softly on comet 67P Chourioumov-Guérassimenko, better known as Tchouri. The culmination of a project decided twenty-one years earlier, in 1993, by the European Space Agency - the first to display the immense ambition of landing on one of these bodies made of ice and dust, archives of the solar system's infancy. To achieve this, it took years of preparation, a decade-long flight, six billion kilometers flown, thousands of scientists and engineers involved... Astrophysicist Anny-Chantal Levasseur-Regourd sums it all up: "From this mission, we hope - and can reasonably expect - to understand the origin of the solar system and how life appeared on Earth.
Direction
Ribot turns bureaucratic patience into cosmic poetry
Cinematography
67P looks like a diseased potato and it's gorgeous
Production
Twenty-one years of bureaucratic willpower, visualized
Director
Jean-Christophe Ribot
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
The mission was named after the Rosetta Stone because comets are considered 'time capsules' containing ancient material—nerdy wordplay at a billion-euro scale.
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