Mission complete: Rosetta’s journey ends in daring descent to comet

ESA’s historic Rosetta mission has concluded as planned, with the controlled impact onto the comet it had been investigating for more than two years.

Confirmation of the end of the mission arrived at ESA’s control centre in Darmstadt, Germany at 11:19 GMT (13:19 CEST) with the loss of Rosetta’s signal upon impact.

Touchdown! Rosetta’s Philae probe lands on comet

Rosetta is a space probe of the European Space Agency [ESA] to study the comet Churyumov–Gerasimenko. It is a joint mission with contributions from its Member States and NASA. Rosetta’s Philae lander was built by a consortium led by the Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (DLR), the Max Planck Society (MPG), the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES) and the Agenzia Spaziale Italiana (ASI). It is the first mission in history to rendezvous with a comet. It is escorting the comet as they orbit the Sun together, and has deployed a lander to its surface. Comets are time capsules containing primitive material left over from the time when the Sun and its planets formed. By studying the …

Rosetta has arrived at the comet

“We are delighted to announce finally ‘we are here’,” says Jean-Jacques Dordain, ESA’s Director General. After 10 years of travelling through the solar system, the ESA’ Rosetta spacecraft began its manoeuvre to orbit the Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko on 6 August 2014. The first images of the Rosetta’s rendezvous with the comet were presented during an event held at ESA’s Space Operations Centre, ESOC, in Darmstadt, Germany, on the same day.
Named after the Rosetta Stone, which was discovered in 1822 and whose engravings have helped to understand hieroglyphs, the Rosetta spacecraft was launched in 2004. The trajectory to reach…