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by dandare 3572 days ago
Nice, but why is this information so "all-important"? How is it going to advance our knowledge of ... anything?
4 comments

I am assuming you don't want to know why the whole mission is important (that should be obvious), and that instead you want to know why taking a photo of Philae is important.

It is important because Philae did made measurements and sent the data to us, but we didn't knew what the measurements measured, now we know.

It would be like throwing a ball that can tell about how much a place is wet in a random direction, and conclude that some place is 90% wet... Then, what place it was? A lake? A swamp? A beach? And then you find a picture of it in a bog, and conclude the bog was 90% wet.

You may wish to actually read the article:

> “This wonderful news means that we now have the missing ‘ground-truth’ information needed to put Philae’s three days of science into proper context, now that we know where that ground actually is!” says Matt Taylor, ESA’s Rosetta project scientist.

Philae did send data for three days (unless i miss-remember). Knowing where that data was taken helps put it into context. So quite important for the mission.
Maybe next time, we try a different landing method, eh? How do you learn from your mistakes without knowing them in the first place?