Rosetta comet probe ends life with ‘suicide mission’
After a 12-year mission to study a huge rock hurtling through the cosmos, the spacecraft’s final mission was to land on its subject
Europe’s comet-chasing space probe Rosetta performed its final task, dipping out of orbit for a slow-motion crash onto the surface of the alien world it’s followed for more than a decade.
Mission controllers lost contact with the probe as expected after it hit the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, marking the planned end of a 12-year mission, the European Space Agency (ESA) said.
Farewell Rosettta, you’ve done the job. That is space science at its best
“Farewell Rosettta, you’ve done the job,” said mission manager Patrick Martin. “That is space science at its best.”
Rosetta was never designed to land. ESA used the final hours to get one-off chance to peer at mysterious markings and get otherwise unobtainable data.
Scientists ordered it to fire its thrusters for 208 seconds and perform a series of measurements as it swooped toward the surface of the 4km-wide comet. Rosetta’s science instruments were primed to sniff the comet’s gassy coma, or halo, measure its temperature and gravity, and take pictures from closer than ever before.
“We will get into a region that we have never sampled before,” said Rosetta project scientist Matt Taylor before the descent. “We’ve never been below 2km and that region is where the coma, the comet atmosphere, becomes alive, it’s where it goes from being an ice to a gas.”