Rosetta’s mission will end with impact into comet 67P

Nature : It’s been just under a year since the European Space Agency’s Philae separated from Rosetta and landed on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Since then, Rosetta has continued to orbit the comet, sending pictures and other data back to Earth. When the mission launched, no decision had been reached concerning what to do with the orbiter after the comet swung around the Sun and began heading off into the far reaches of the solar system. Over the last year, the mission team members have debated the options and settled on what they think is the best: crashing Rosetta into the comet—gently—so they can take extreme close-up pictures of the comet’s surface. Now the team is determining how best to do this by September 2016, when the mission’s funding ends. Rosetta will be able to descend much more slowly than Philae did and take even more detailed images. However, for scientists to receive the images, Rosetta must descend on the side of the comet facing Earth.