// block 329705 · space · 12 November 2014
Philae lands on a comet
The moment this block marks: Philae's first contact with the surface of the comet, 12 November 2014, 15:35:00 UTC. The first block mined after it is block 329,705, 12 November 2014, 15:52:23 UTC.
On 12 November 2014, the European Space Agency's lander Philae separated from the Rosetta spacecraft and descended for seven hours towards comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, more than 500 million kilometres from Earth. Rosetta had travelled for ten years to reach the comet and fall into step with it.
At 15:35 UTC Philae touched the surface at the site the mission had named Agilkia. Its harpoons did not fire, and it bounced twice before coming to rest in a shaded spot farther away, but it had landed: the first spacecraft to come down softly on a comet. For about two and a half days it ran its instruments and sent back images and measurements, until its battery ran out.
The signal of the touchdown needed 28 minutes to cross the distance, and reached the control centre in Darmstadt at 16:03 UTC. Block 329,705 was mined in between: seventeen minutes after Philae touched the comet, and eleven minutes before the news reached Earth. Its hash, like every hash, can be checked on any node.
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