Video: Mission control celebrates separation but anxiety builds over landing

Amateur astronomers around the globe have a ringside seat as Comet 2013 A1 (Siding Spring) hurtles through space en route to an incredibly close encounter with the planet Mars on Sunday, 19 October.

With just over a week to go before touchdown, the landing site for Rosetta’s Philae probe has been named Agilkia, after an island on the Nile River in southern Egypt.

The sharp-eyed science camera on Europe’s Rosetta comet orbiter caught a view of the probe’s fuzzy shadow when controllers guided the spacecraft just a few miles over its subject’s nucleus last month.