Clear your calendars! The date has been set—the NASA Philae landing probe from the European Space Agency Rosetta space satellite will attempt to land on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on Wednesday 12 November. With any luck the lander will successfully touch down at around 15:35 GMT, with confirmation due to arrive some time after 16.00 GMT.

Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Photo by Rosetta / ESA.

The landing site, known as ‘J’, has been carefully selected out of a shortlist of five potential sites. It is on the smaller of the comet’s two lobes (the head of the rubber duck).

Landing site J. Photo by Rosetta / ESA.

There is a high risk involved in such a tricky procedure. If successful, the lander will screw itself into position and then undertake some scientific analyses of the surface chemistry, drilling for samples and analysing them in an onboard laboratory. The scientists do not expect Philae to last much beyond next March as it will fail at some point due to overheating. Rosettta will stay in orbit for a year, sending back information as the comet moves in its elliptical orbit around the sun. Exciting (and nailbiting) times ahead. THE BBC article carries this caveat: The timings mentioned on this page carry some uncertainty and would change if subsequent mapping shows the J site to have a major problem, with Esa forced to shift its attention to the back-up destination, C.