It’s rare enough to be legitimately struck by awe and wonder (that people click on so many links promising a dropped jaw proves the hunger for it), but I can’t remember the last time I was so amazed, so impressed with human ingenuity, patience, and resolve, as I am with the European Space Agency’s successful landing of a craft onto Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Check out these photos, which hardly seem real, they are so real. Downright Kubrickian. Makes me want to get a tattoo.
The Rosetta spacecraft’s successful ten-year chase of a speeding comet—a 2.5 mile wide chunk of rock and ice traveling at 85,000 mph over 315 million miles from earth—and then landing on it, reminds me of this: