Discovery of 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko

Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is a short-period comet that orbits the Sun roughly every six and a half years. It was discovered in 1969 by the Soviet astronomers Klim Churyumov and Svetlana Gerasimenko, who examined photographic plates taken at the observatory in Alma-Ata, in what is now Kazakhstan; Churyumov found the object on one of those plates in October. The comet became famous when the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft reached it in 2014 and orbited it for two years. In November 2014 Rosetta's lander Philae touched down on the surface, the first soft landing on a comet, though it bounced and ended up in shadow. The mission returned detailed data on the comet's shape, ices and organic compounds.

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