Eurpoe's pioneer Rosetta spacecraft concluded a 12-year odyssey today with a controlled crash-landing onto the comet it has orbited and probed for two years to unravel the secrets of the Solar System’s birth, mission controllers said.
Flying in tandem with the comet some 356 million miles from the sun, Rosetta and its quarry had moved beyond the range where the spacecraft’s solar panels could generate enough energy to power all of the probe’s instruments and subsystems.
The mission managed several historic firsts, such as getting a spacecraft into orbit around a comet and the unprecedented landing of a probe on the surface.