Rosetta Deliberately Crashes Into Comet, Bringing Its Historic Mission To An End : The Two-Way The Rosetta spacecraft has been orbiting the 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko comet for two years.

Comet 67P is currently travelling back out towards the farthest point from the sun in its orbit. At that distance, the power Rosetta's solar cells can collect from the sun is significantly reduced.

Comets will occasionally come a little too close to the Sun and crash into a fiery oblivion, but until now we had never been able to see it as it happened (though there have been some fake comet ...

This particular comet crash wasn’t anything spectacular, at least not compared to some of the others that we’ve seen over the years. Still, it is fascinating to watch, and astronomers say it ...

Rosetta's historic 12-year mission 30 photos. The European Space Agency’s $1.6 billion Rosetta spacecraft completed a deliberate crash landing on the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko ...

Scientists at the European Space Agency received surprising data from the Rosetta spacecraft just before it crash-landed into a comet last year, enabling them to piece together a final image of ...

Those images will help researchers determine the result of their comet crashing mission. 1:45 a.m. EDT July 4, 2005. Impactor is right on target coming out of its third and final targeting burn.

1 Day Before Crashing on Comet 67P ESA Rosetta's OSIRIS wide-angle camera image taken at 7:48 a.m. EDT (11:49 GMT) on Sept. 29, when the spacecraft was 14.2 miles (22.9 km) from Comet 67P ...

NASA's recycled Stardust spacecraft flew past comet Tempel 1 late last night (Feb. 14), snapping photos of the site where a different probe crashed into the icy surface nearly six years ago.

The crash will definitely be a hard stop to the mission, he says, however gentle the landing. Designed to manoeuvre in orbit, once Rosetta is on the comet’s surface it will no longer be able to ...