After a historic mission that included the first-ever landing on a comet the Philae space probe has been put to sleep. Low battery power and a lack of visibility forced European Space Agency (ESA) handlers to power down the spacecraft, though only after it managed to beam a trove of new scientific data back to Earth.
ESA scientists announced in a weekend blog post that, for now, the mission appears to have ended early because the batteries ran down sooner than anticipated. Philae was supposed to transmit data from Comet 67/P for as long as nine months, finding a charge on its solar-powered battery as the comet p...
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