Today, we landed a probe about the size of a washing machine on the surface of a comet about the size of the main populated bit of Derby, 500 million km. away. At that distance, the radio signals carrying instructions up and pictures down take 28 minutes each way.

That's pretty freaking awesome.

If you scale the distances down to something more manageable, it's like the equivalent of standing in London and firing a gun and hitting a moving target, 1/20 of the width of a human hair, in Paris.

Meanwhile, some kid watching the news on the TV or Internet is going to be fired up by the sheer freaking awesomeness of it all, and decide right there and then that they want to be a scientist when they grow up because science is so freaking awesome. Hopefully lots of kids. And they'll go to university and get their MScs and their PhDs and end up doing something that will be so even more freaking awesome that it will make landing Philae on P67 look about as impressive as reversing a car into a garage.

This must be the way people were feeling on the day the first human stepped on the Moon, two years and eight days before Yours Truly was born.

(And the real experiment, drilling into the comet and analysing whatever is found in there, hasn't even started yet .....)