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The ESA's Rosetta spacecraft has reached the end of its incredible mission, in a controlled crash onto the surface of the comet that has been the focus of its attention for over two years.
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See Rosetta's final views as it descended to a comet crash


Scott Sutherland
Meteorologist/Science Writer

Friday, September 30, 2016, 12:54 PM - The ESA's Rosetta spacecraft has reached the end of its incredible mission, in a controlled crash onto the surface of the comet that has been the focus of its attention for over two years.

Rosetta, and its tiny companion Philae, have given us a fascinating close-up look at a comet, but now the mission has come to an end.

Watch, below, as the European Space Agency presents the final hour of Rosetta's Grand Finale, from their European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, Germany:

Although Comet 67P's gravity is too low to have caused significant damage to Rosetta, the mission team commanded the spacecraft to shut down completely upon touching down, thus ending the mission. Final transmission from Rosetta was received by ESA mission control at 7:19 a.m. EDT (13:19 CEST). Rosetta has now joined Philae on the surface, as another artifact of humanity travelling through the solar system.

The end of an amazing mission

Rosetta and Philae slipped into orbit of Comet 67P in August of 2014, and while Philae landed in November of 2014 and was subsequently lost, the Rosetta spacecraft has continued its orbits, sometimes far away and sometimes very close, gathering as much information and images as possible, to send back to controllers and scientists here on Earth.

While the team was overjoyed to finally locate little lost Philae, just a few short weeks ago, the overall mission was now coming to an end. Rather than simply slipping off into space, however, it was decided that Rosetta would join Philae on the comet's surface, by making a controlled descent and a very deliberate collision with the comet.

The target of this collision is not random, however. It was very carefully chosen.

According to the ESA:

The region, known as Ma’at, lies on the smaller of the two lobes of Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. It is home to several active pits more than 100 m in diameter and 50–60 m in depth – where a number of the comet’s dust jets originate.
The walls of the pits also exhibit intriguing metre-sized lumpy structures called 'goosebumps', which scientists believe could be the signatures of early 'cometesimals' that assembled to create the comet in the early phases of Solar System formation.
Rosetta will get its closest look yet at these fascinating structures on 30 September: the spacecraft will target a point adjacent to a 130 m-wide, well-defined pit that the mission team has informally named Deir el-Medina, after a structure with a similar appearance in an ancient Egyptian town of the same name.
Like the archaeological artifacts found inside the Egyptian pit that tell historians about life in that town, the comet’s pit contains clues to the geological history of the region.


This sequence of images of Rosetta's landing zone were captured by the spacecraft during its descent to the surface of Comet 67P/C-G on September 30, 2016. Credit: ESA / Rosetta / MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS / UPD / LAM / IAA / SSO / INTA / UPM / DASP / IDA

And the final images captured by Rosetta during its descent?


This sequence of images chronicles Rosetta's descent from 20 km down to just over 1 km above the comet's surface, over a period of just over 11 hours, from Sept 29-30, 2016. Credit: ESA / Rosetta / MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS / UPD / LAM / IAA / SSO / INTA / UPM / DASP / IDA

This is the last thing the spacecraft saw before touchdown:


Taken with the OSIRIS wide-angle camera shortly before impact, Rosetta snapped this picture at an estimated altitude of about 20 m above the surface. At the 5 mm/pixel scale of this image, the "rock" in the upper right quadrant would be about 44 cm by 29 cm in size. Credit: ESA / Rosetta / MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS / UPD / LAM / IAA / SSO / INTA / UPM / DASP / IDA

Although blurry, even this image will likely provide some amazing science, just as with every other view of the comet that this mission has provided us with before.

Interested in more of the incredible science that Rosetta and Philae have made possible through this mission? Watch the scientists involved in the mission talk about their contributions to science here:http://livestream.com/ESA/rosettagrandfinale

Source: ESA

Watch Below: Rosetta's Once Upon A Time journey to the surface of comet

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