Rosetta: 'Audacious' comet landing site chosen

Europe's Rosetta mission team, which aims to land on a 4km-wide comet later this year, has identified what they think is the safest place to land a small robot craft.

Experts have chosen what they hope is a relatively smooth region on the smaller of the comet's two lobes.

Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, currently sweeping through space some 440 million kilometres from Earth, is highly irregular in shape.

At a European Space Agency news briefing, OSIRIS Principal Investigator Holger Sierks gave details of the primary landing site "J".