The European Space Agency has picked a spot where it will try the first landing on a comet, a maneuver that is one of the most important of a decade-long mission.
The Paris-based agency said it will drop the 220-pound "Philae" lander from its Rosetta space probe this November, according to a report by the Associated Press.
Scientists picked a landing spot on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko unanimously due to its relatively safe terrain.
They had five spots to pick from, according to AP. Mission team-members gathered to assess the latest imagery downlinked from Rosetta, which has been tracking the comet since early August.
A back-up site on the 2.5-mile wide comet is located on the larger of 67P's lobes, according to BBC News.
"Everything we've discovered at 67P/C-G so far says that we've chosen a fantastic comet to visit," said Dr. Christopher Carr, a principal investigator on the Rosetta Plasma Consortium instruments, according to BBC News. "There's a genuine sense of excitement within the Rosetta community, and we're all looking forward to the year ahead."
Events will be taking place so far away that real-time radio control will be impossible, meaning it will be a one shot opportunity.
The process will have to be fully automated with the final commands uploaded to Rosetta and Philae a couple days beforehand.
Last week, Rosetta maneuvered into an orbit not far away from the 67P, enabling its camera system to see details that can be measured on the centimeter scale, according to BBC News.
If Philae gets down successfully into a stable configuration, it would represent a historic moment in space exploration.
"No spacecraft has ever orbited an active comet before, so there's a lot to learn about spacecraft and instrument operations, but we've got a really robust mission carrying some of the best instrumentation possible, and I have to say that the operations teams at the European Space Agency are doing a great job - they are true professionals," Carr said to BBC News.
Philae will carry a drill to pull up comet samples into an onboard laboratory.
Any surface information collected by Philae will provide important "ground truth" for Rosetta's sensing observations, according to BBC News.
Rosetta will follow 67P for at least a year no matter what the outcome is on Nov. 11.
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