Lander manager says Philae is doing well but battery life is low

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.

Rosetta mission scientist Matt Taylor says the science team is jubilant after the Philae lander captured the historic, first close up images of the surface of a comet and began returning data from its science instruments.

The sharpest, most detailed observations of a comet breaking apart have been captured with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The images suggest that the roughly 4.5-billion-year-old comet, named 332P/Ikeya-Murakami, may be spinning so fast that material is ejected from its surface. The resulting debris is now scattered along a 3,000-mile-long trail.