ESA's Rosetta to End Mission With a Comet Crash

ESA's successful comet orbiter and lander duo for the Rosetta mission will face its inevitable end through a comet crash this year. Rosetta will be sent to its death by manipulating the spacecraft to crash Comet 67P on Sept. 30.

The European Space Agency (ESA) and its comet chaser Rosetta became popular when the mission landed an instrument on a comet. In 2004, the Rosetta orbiter was sent to space. It reached comet 67P and successfully landed Philae on the surface of the comet. But ESA is ready to bid farewell to its comet chaser two years after it started orbiting comet 67P.

Rosetta was the first man-made comet orbiter to circumnavigate a comet's nucleus. And although the mission successfully managed to land Philae on the comet, the mission base on Earth lost connection with the lander a few months after its landing on the comet.

Both the orbiter and lander has provided vital information about comets. Rosetta's mission was initially set to end in December 2015. That is the reason why ESA is ready to make an orbital correction that will send Rosetta to its death by crashing it into the comet.

Rosetta has been orbiting comet 67P since 2014 and it has managed to gather a lot of information ever since, despite the failure of the Philae Lander. ESA applauds Rosetta's contribution to science for the last two years.

"Rosetta has returned reams of data we are only beginning to analyze," Mark McCaughrean, senior science adviser at ESA said in a statement. "It is transforming our understanding of the way the solar system was put together."

The continued data analysis means scientists can expect more fascinating discoveries along the way, even after Rosetta's death. Rosetta and its Philae lander made key discoveries about a comet's composition. It was discovered that a comet's surface is covered with hard ice with a thick layer of dust where organic chemicals might be detected.

One major finding from Rosetta's mission is the conclusion that Earth's water did not come from comets. It was part of Rosetta's mission to identify whether comets contributed to the formation of the Earth billions of years ago.

Rosetta's anticipated end-of-mission maneuver is scheduled to take effect on Sept. 30, a few weeks from today. A calculated rocket burn will change Rosetta's orbit configuration, sending it on a free fall to crash on comet 67P, according to Planetary.Org.

ESA says the maneuver will be initiated on Sept. 24 to prepare for its final descent, while the collision course will be instigated on Sept. 29 from an altitude of 20 kilometers. The Earth-borne mission base will be notified of the impact after a 40-minute signal travel time from the spacecraft to the planet.