Related: Everything you need to know about Rosetta, including live coverage of Wednesday's landing.

Comet 67P/Churyumov- Gerasimenk

It's a new generation's version of the moon landing: If all goes as planned, on Nov. 12 humans will land a probe on a comet for the first time in history.

Up-Close Shots of Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko

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This summer, Rosetta, a spacecraft sent up by the European Space Agency (ESA) to study the comet 67P/Churyumov- Gerasimenko throughout 2015, pulled up alongside it. Part of Rosetta's mission is to release a craft called Philae, which will land on 67P and perform scientific measurements that could help teach us about the evolution of our solar system. "Comets are around 4.6 billion years old, primordial debris left over from the formation of the solar system," says Matt Taylor, an ESA project scientist, "so they're little time capsules of the conditions during that time. As we get more data from the comet, we can know how close or far from the sun it was when it was formed, which helps show us the evolution process." Here, a closer look at the mission details.

Rosetta Spacecraft

Dust

Three of the lander's 11 instruments are concerned especially with dust—tiny pieces of rock, ice, and organic material that can tell us about where and when the comet was created. (The comet tails we see from Earth are sunlight reflecting off billions of these particles.) GIADA measures the number of particles, their size, and speed. COSIMA zaps individual particles with a beam of indium ions for analysis in its built-in spectrometer. And MIDAS can measure particles as small as a few nanometers wide (that's one-billionth of a meter), creating 3D pictures of their size, shape, and structure.

DNA

On previous missions comets have been found to contain glycine, an organic molecule linked to proteins—and thus, DNA—that is considered a building block of life on Earth. Glycines are often released as gas, which Philae locates by "sniffing" the air. The lander also has a tool called SD2 that drills into the comet and takes a sample. The sample goes into one of SD2's 26 ovens (the hottest can hit 1,472 degrees Fahrenheit) to melt the ice and release any frozen gases, allowing researchers to study their density, texture, strength, and thermal properties.

Internal Structure

Both Philae and Rosetta have radio transmitters. This allows Philae to send radio waves through the comet to Rosetta on the other side, creating an image like a CAT scan of the comet's nucleus. It could deliver groundbreaking information about a comet's internal structure and composition, and how it evolved.

Philae Lander

Landing Zone

The comet is only 2½ miles across, is uneven in shape, and has very low gravity. "We need to precisely land something the size of a washing machine on a target that's only a few hundred meters across, in a gravitational pull only 10/100 millionths of what we feel on Earth," says Taylor.

The Landing

Rosetta will drop Philae from 3 miles above the comet's surface. The concern is Philae bouncing off the comet's surface and back into space, where it would be as lost as George Clooney in Gravity. To counter this, a jet of cold gas will fire at the top of Philae to push downward as it lands.

How It Holds On

The comet is only 2½ miles across, is uneven in shape, and has very low gravity. "We need to precisely land something the size of a washing machine on a target that's only a few hundred meters across, in a gravitational pull only 10/100 millionths of what we feel on Earth," says Taylor.

Power

Philae is powered by a battery that's recharged with energy from six solar panels. To conserve its juice, the tools are made super energy-efficient. For example, the SD2 drill needs only about 10 watts—one-hundredth of what's consumed by the average household drill.

Reporting Back

Philae transmits data to Rosetta, which relays it to Earth. Since the spacecraft will be 3.4 astronomical units (some 316 million miles) from Earth, signals take nearly 30 minutes to arrive.

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