Video: After two years of science, the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission ended yesterday in a gentle crash-landing. But if you haven’t been tracking this spacecraft’s movements as obsessively as we have, you might be wracking your brain trying to remember what the Rosetta mission was.
The Rosetta spacecraft has spent three years peering at Comet 67P/Churyumov — Gerasimenko from orbit — but this week, its watch will end. On September 30, Rosetta begins a controlled descent to its final resting place on the edge of an enormous pit, where it will remain frozen until the…
In the shadow of a cliff on an icy rock 700 million kilometres from Earth, a washing machine-sized robot by the name of Philae has spent the last two years in hibernation. We’d already given up hope of speaking with humanity’s first and only comet lander ever again, and time…