The European Space Agency's (ESA) landing attempt on a comet is coming to a head, as the deep-space Rosetta satellite will fire its Philae lander on Wednesday, Nov. 12.

According to BBC News, the ESA has no reasons to delay Rosetta's attempt to attach itself to Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The satellite is so far from Earth, ground control will not be able to guide the Philae lander to the comet, but will have to rely on the probe's own pre-set functions.

The ESA has the landing command ready to go and have commanded the satellite to start warming up.

"The point of separation is fixed in time, in space, velocity and attitude; and we have to reach exactly that point," Andrea Accomazzo, ESA flight director, told BBC News. "So, wherever Rosetta is, we have to design a maneuver to reach that point."

In an allusion to NASA's "seven minutes of terror" in landing their Curiosity rover on the surface of Mars, the space agency called the waiting period for Rosetta "seven hours of terror." Ground control will have to wait about seven hours to learn if the landing attempt was successful, Space.com reported.

"This comet is very, very rough," Accomazzo said in a Google+ Hangout late last week. "But this is what we have, and this is what we are trying to do. We have to be a bit lucky as well."

Space.com has a live stream from NASA and the ESA, which will get going at 2 p.m. EST Tuesday. Mission managers should know if Rosetta was successful by 11 a.m. EST Wednesday.

If successful, this will be the first time any space agency has ever landed a satellite on a comet. Rosetta hopes to intimately document 67P as it travels from deep space toward the sun. The satellite had to drift through space in hibernation mode for about a decade to reach its target.

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