Now that the Philae lander has attached itself to Comet 67P/CG, it has beamed back some images from its historic approach.

The European Space Agency (ESA) confirmed Wednesday morning around 11:15 a.m. EST that the Rosetta satellite's Philae lander became the first spacecraft to ever hook onto a comet. The probe will gather never-before-seen data on the life of a comet, as 67P makes its journey toward the sun.

According to the Guardian, the landing was not perfectly smooth, as engineers believe the lander bounced off the surface and had to reset its harpoons in the comet. Philae also had a short communication failure, but all reports state the historic comet-landing attempt was successful.

Ground control had to wait several hours for the landing attempt to be completed, but perhaps nothing was more agonizing than the last 28 minutes. Due to how far Rosetta is from Earth, data takes nearly half-an-hour to reach Earth, so mission managers knew when Philae's attempt would have succeeded or failed, yet they had to wait for confirmation either way.

"It's a look at the basic building blocks of our solar system, the ancient materials from which life emerged," Kathrin Altwegg a Rosetta project's lead researcher at the University of Bern in Switzerland, told the Washington Post. "It's like doing archaeology, but instead of going back 1,000 years, we can go back 4.6 billion."

While ESA has led the way in the Rosetta mission, it will be beneficial for the global scientific community and several other agencies helped out.

In a statement, NASA said it contributed "three of the 16 instruments on board the Rosetta orbiter. The NASA instruments are: the Microwave Instrument for Rosetta Orbiter (MIRO); Alice, an ultraviolet spectrometer; and the Ion and Electron Sensor (IES), which is part of a suite of five instruments."