It is still very early to draw major conclusions from the Philae mission. After all, we still hope that the lander will wake up to do more science; Rosetta is now listening for the lander regularly. I talked with Philae lander manager Stefan Ulamec at the LPSC poster session yesterday, and (as he has said ever since landing day) he still does not expect to hear anything from the lander until at least May.

I talked with other comet scientists about the Philae talks afterwards, and they were dubious about Mottola's aeolian interpretation of the landforms on the comet. The thing is, you have tiny masses experiencing tiny forces under nearly zero gravity; there's no lab work you can do on Earth that can help you understand the physics that's at play here. But the ROLIS images will give us a starting point, at least, telling us what it is that we need to understand. If I had to generalize from what I saw at the Philae session, it's to say that physics at very small scales is very important in comets -- in how they are put together, and how they behave. So it's a good thing we sent a lander down to the surface to tell us what it looks like, and we have a lot left to learn from Philae.

I did not attend any Rosetta talks at the conference, so I'm grateful to the other LPSC microbloggers who attended and tweeted. Here is a sampling of Rosetta results from later in the session: