Historic Rosetta probe goes silent, thumps down on comet

After more than a decade of observing comets in the cosmos, the historic Rosetta spacecraft executed a planned crash on Comet 67P around 7:20 a.m. Eastern time. While the touchdown was a gentle two miles per hour, the probe was never designed to land and its intentional crash cut off transmissions to Earth.

While researchers had determined Rosetta's mission had come to an end as it followed Comet 67P to the outer leg of its orbit, taking the probe away from the sun, its power source, Rosetta leaves behind overwhelming amounts of data that still need to be analyzed. The probe was the first to orbit a comet and it opened up a new era of understanding how the rock and ice bodies are tied to the universe's origins.

"There is no mission in the future that will do anything like Rosetta," Christopher Carr, the head of one of Rosetta's instrument teams, said. Watch the 2014 short film about Rosetta's mission below, and the epilogue released Wednesday by the European Space Agency, here. Jeva Lange

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