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The European Space Agency released this cartoon on Friday, showing Rosetta landing, with Philae nearby. This gallery highlights key images from the mission
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Rosetta was launched on March 2, 2004 aboard an Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana.
ESA
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This image of Mars was taken on February 24, 2007, at a distance of about 150,000 miles from the red planet. This was one of four planetary gravity-assisted flybys of the spacecraft en route to Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
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Finally, in late June 2014, the spacecraft approached its quarry. Here, Rosetta is 86,000 km away from the comet.
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About three weeks later, about 5,500 km away, the comet’s peanut shape began to become visible.
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In August 2014, the comet came into clear view. This “boot”-like image was taken at a distance of 285 km.
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This single frame Rosetta navigation camera image was taken on March 14, 2015 from a distance of 85.7 km.
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False-color image of the smooth Hapi region connecting the head and body of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
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A narrow-angle OSIRIS camera image taken on June 6, 2016, when Rosetta was located 14 mi (22.9 km) from the center of Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The scale is 0.40 m/pixel.
ESA/Rosetta/MPS
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The Philae lander separated from Rosetta on November 12, 2014. He is shown traveling to the comet’s surface.
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What the landing of the Philae lander was supposed to look like. Alas, it tumbled out of control and was lost…
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…until it was found nearly two years later, when a narrow-angle OSIRIS camera image taken on Sept. 2, 2016 spotted it. Philae is on the far right of the image, just above center.
ESA/Rosetta
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Several features of Philae can be discerned in this image, taken with Rosetta’s low-angle OSIRIS camera image.
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One of the last pictures of the full comet, on September 29, 2016. Rosetta was less than 14 miles (23 km) from the comet.
ESA/Rosetta
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To come closer.
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Rosetta’s OSIRIS angle camera captured this image during the spacecraft’s final descent, just 5.7 km away.
ESA/Rosetta
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Rosetta’s final image of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, taken shortly before impact, estimated 20 m above the surface. The resolution is 5 mm per pixel.
ESA/Rosetta
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One of the last signals from Rosetta at the European Space Agency’s mission control center, via NASA’s 70-meter tracking station in Madrid, during the comet’s landing.
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And less than a minute later, the signal was gone. If your eyes are dry.
ESA
Unless Matt Damon soon becomes stranded on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko and needs an emergency call back to Earth, the world will never hear from the Rosetta spacecraft again. But the European vehicle has served humanity well since its launch 12 years ago. Rosetta became the first probe to both orbit a comet and place a lander on a comet’s surface. On Friday morning, the spacecraft joined its small lander, Philae, on the comet’s surface. Once there it closed.
Even before the European Space Agency’s Giotto spacecraft got within 600 km of the core of Halley’s Comet in 1986, the agency was already thinking of a comet lander as a follow-up mission. After its final launch in 2004, Rosetta took a long time to reach Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The probe had to fly past planets in the inner solar system four times (three around Earth, one around Mars) for gravity assist, and it traveled nearly five billion miles before descending to rest on Comet Friday. The gallery above captures some of the highlights of the 12-year mission.
From a scientific point of view, Rosetta confirms that comets are leftovers from when the solar system formed, rather than fragments of later collisions. Comets therefore provide a window to 4.6 billion years ago. The program was also a public relations success. “The astonishing journey of Rosetta and its Philae lander was not only a scientific and engineering triumph, but it also captured the world’s imagination and attracted new audiences far beyond the scientific community,” said Mark McCaughrean, ESA senior science advisor.
The Rosetta mission was largely successful, although the Philae lander was lost when the securing harpoons failed to fire after it reached the surface. Even after tumbling, the small lander still returned valuable data. And now scientists will spend the next few years interpreting data Rosetta spent more than two years collecting from its comet, including data from the probe’s final moments of descent.
List image by ESA