And this seems like a good place to end the coverage today. The final, final images have just been shown. We know that science data was flowing back to Earth from Rosetta until the final moment of touch down. We know that it is going to take years to fully analyse all the data.
But we already know that Rosetta’s data will force the textbooks to be re-written.
Everyone agrees that this has been the most extraordinary mission. It is one that has shown what Europe can do when it works together. It has shown us the origin of the solar system and our own planet and has given us the best clues we have ever had about how life’s ingredients were delivered to this world more than four billion years ago.
I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s coverage and feel inspired by Rosetta to think big. Farewell from Darmstadt.
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A couple of final images are now being shown by Holger Sierks; here is one of them from just seconds before the end of the mission.
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Here’s the rather subdued moment when the spacecraft controllers recognise the lose of Rosetta’s signal. Well, you didn’t expect high-fives and dancing this time did you? They’ve just driven a billion Euro spacecraft into a rock.
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ESA scientist Laurence O’Rouke, who found the lost Philae lander a few weeks ago, has just told me that he is surprised how sad he feels. “It’s surprising. We were all prepared for this but it is still a bittersweet moment. It does allow us to look back and see who much Rosetta and Philae achieved – and that is overwhelming.”
Read our summary of the end of the mission here.
The final images are in. They are unprocessed and raw but they are here, on Earth ready to be analysed. The final image was captured just 5 seconds before the end of the mission.
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And that’s also it for the @ESA_Rosetta twitter account. All tweets were first person ‘from’ the spacecraft. A joy to follow, a triumph for ESA communications, but now a hole to fill for space fans around the planet.
Mission complete #CometLanding pic.twitter.com/m3oxRNPzPI
— ESA Rosetta Mission (@ESA_Rosetta) September 30, 2016
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A quick ‘stitch’ of the descent images. Better ones promised soon!
Busy scanning my target #CometLanding region! pic.twitter.com/CYhEnl35TT
— ESA Rosetta Mission (@ESA_Rosetta) September 30, 2016
“I don’t know what to say,” says a very emotional Matt Taylor, “But I’ll say something... Rosetta was rock and roll. It turned everything up to eleven.”
“A culmination of tremendous scientific and technical success,” says Patrick Martin, Rosetta mission manager, “Farewell Rosetta, you have done the job.”
Rosetta has ended
That’s it. The signal has disappeared. The spacecraft has landed on the comet and been rendered inactive. Rosetta is dead. Long live Rosetta.
Remember, the graph to watch on the livestream is the green squiggle. That will become a more or less flat line when the mission ends. The spacecraft operators are all simply standing and watching that screen. Nothing is being said.
Oooh. It’s all gone very sombre here. Confirmation of touchdown is five minutes away, and the commentary has been turned off so that we can watch and wait for the end silently. Suddenly, its all feeling rather funereal.
Bibring says that Philae and Rosetta have shown us that the comet contains all of the complex ingredients that could have helped life form on Earth.
Jean-Pierre Bibring, Lead Lander Scientist, IAS in Orsay, France, is now talking about the Philae landing from November 2014. The accidental bounce was a good thing because it allowed Philae to sample the comet’s composition across a large swath of the surface instead on in a single place.
In fact, at the birth of the Rosetta mission, ESA wondered if they could build a lander that would hop across the surface. They abandoned the idea as too expensive, then achieved it by accident when Philae failed to grab the surface. Nice!
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Data is now coming back from just 1 km in altitude above the comet. This is the closest that Rosetta has ever been to the comet. It has seen a landslip inside the Ma’at pit that Holger Sierks describes as ‘super-duper’.
Look what’s available in the ESA gift shop.
With reference to our understanding of comets and the origin of the solar system, Project Scientist Matt Taylor says that the data collected by this mission has ‘blown it all open’.
“We have decades of work to do on this mission,” he says, referring to the analysis that must now be done to understand all of the data sent back.
Claire Vallet, Rosetta Liaison Scientist, ESA, says that Rosetta has provided a 4D picture of the comet. By that she means that the spacecraft has watched the comet since August 2014 and has shown how it changes with time.
Good images have already been taken of the interior of the Ma’at pits, which is where the ‘goose bumps’ can be seen. These are probably the original building blocks of ice that came together to form the comet at the start of the Solar System.
The flight team now know exactly where Rosetta will touch down. It is just 40 metres away from their original target.
Everything is going well collecting the science. Images are coming down ‘like a charm’ according to Holger Sierks who is the principal investigator of the OSIRIS camera on Rosetta.
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Rosetta should be touching the comet any minute now, but we have to wait for the signal to travel for 40 minutes across the Solar System before we know for sure.
Roberto Battiston, President of the Italian Space Agency says that Rosetta has been a mission of courage, and shows “Europe at its best”.
ESA Director General Jan Woerner thanks the agency’s member states for their courage in committing large amounts of money to this groundbreaking European mission.
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For those who cannot follow the ESA livestream audio, I’ll pick out the highlights for you.
One hour left in @ESA_Rosetta's magnificent journey #CometLanding #67P pic.twitter.com/oP7tuRBDuP
— ESA Operations (@esaoperations) September 30, 2016
The end of the mission has been dictated by a number of factors. Firstly, the comet and Rosetta are now heading back into deep space. Out there the sunlight is dim and soon Rosetta will not be able to generate enough power to keep going.
Already, parts of the spacecraft are having to be turned off to conserve power. Secondly, the comet and Rosetta will soon be behind the sun as seen from Earth, and this will make communication almost impossible.
So the decision was taken to drop the spacecraft to the surface and perform science all the way down.
The spacecraft could have been made to ‘touch down’ much more gently. There are thrusters that could have fired to slow down the craft but the exhaust gasses would have contaminated the science results that they are hoping to get on the way down.
So today’s somewhat more dramatic ending has been planned instead.
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They do.
ESA have made chocolates in the shape of the Rosetta comet. Let’s hope they taste better than the comet would.
The amazing thing about the comet is that although it looks completely solid, more than 70% of the interior is vacuum.
These empty spaces are contained not in huge caverns but in the snow-like ice and fluffy dust grains. If you want to imagine what the density of this comet is like, imagine a hand full of uncompacted snow.
Yet this snowball is kilometres across – and it’s been circling the sun for more than four billion years.
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They’re playing Howard Shore’s soundtrack to Lord of the Rings here in the press centre. Makes you wonder what they are hoping to find on the comet (or take back)...
Why end the Rosetta mission with the plunge to the comet? Matt Taylor, ESA Rosetta project scientist puts it this way: “I’ve seen certain rock bands with certain singers that can’t sing anymore. They should have stopped when they were fully functioning. And that is what we are doing here with Rosetta. It is maximising what we can do with the spacecraft at this time. This plunge is the only way to get this science.”
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There are mixed feelings here at ESA. On the one hand, people are happy to be back together for another Rosetta event, but of course they all recognise that this is the last one. Spacecraft Operations Manager Andrea Accomazzo told me yesterday that he was a bit sad. He has worked on the mission for more than 20 years.
When asked for his most vivd memory of the entire mission, he said that his strongest emotion was when Rosetta woke up. That was the moment on 20 January 2014 when the spacecraft roused itself from hibernation.
When the signal was received at Earth, after a nail-biting quarter of an hour delay, everyone knew that the mission was really going to happen.
Here was Andrea celebrating at that moment:
Pure delight as a signal is received from @ESA_Rosetta in #ESOC Mission Control http://t.co/JGzPT5GZ8R
— ESA (@esa) January 20, 2014
As befits this mission, there is drama and risk right to the very end. Rosetta is the first time that a spacecraft has really studied a comet. It has been travelling with Comet 67P/C-G since August 2014. In that time, the scientists believe that they have understood for the first time the way in which comets are formed more than 4 billion years ago, at the same time that our own planet was forming.
Key to their new understanding are features on the comet called ‘positive relief features’. These are lumps of about a metre across. The scientists refer to them as goose bumps; I’ve even heard them called dragon’s eggs.
Today’s descent is designed to get the best images possible of these goose bumps. Rosetta is heading towards a pit in the Ma’at region of the comet. Inside the pit, it will be trying to see more goosebumps.
These are thought to be the original icy boulders that formed in the solar system more than four billion years ago and then came together to form this comet. In short, the goose bumps are some of the most ancient unaltered objects from the beginning of the solar system. They contain all the ingredients that were available to form life on Earth.
The descent today is designed to see these natural treasures in as much detail as possible – and the only way to do it is to sacrifice the spacecraft.
But what a way to go – cutting edge science to the very end.
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First you see it, then you don’t. This is how we will know that Rosetta has landed.
Less than 3 hours to #CometLanding! How will we know the mission is ended? More about @ESA_Rosetta’s final signal at https://t.co/n0Fr2v1B7R pic.twitter.com/HJKfIwnbNz
— ESA Science (@esascience) September 30, 2016
Update from the control room. The comet landing time is now calculated to be 11:38 BST. Confirmation is expected at 12:18 BST because the comet is so far away it will take the signal 40 minutes to cross space and reach Earth.
“Rosetta has been comparable to the moon landing,” said Andrea Accomazzo, ESA’s spacecraft operations manager. “It’s that order of magnitude. As a child, I could only have dreamt something like this. It’s interesting to see how many emotions landing on a comet still triggers in very many people.”
Read our detailed report of the end of mission here.
The spacecraft control team watching the confirmation come in that Rosetta is on its way down to the comet.
.@ESA_Rosetta control team now seeing the final commands (sent earlier) being processed on board #CometLanding pic.twitter.com/Gw06JYRrir
— ESA Operations (@esaoperations) September 30, 2016
What do you call this moment? The spacecraft will touch the comet’s surface with a speed of about 90 cm/s, or about walking pace. Is it a landing? Not really, because the spacecraft is descending too fast. Is it a crash? Not really, because the spacecraft is descending too slowly. People here seem to be calling it a controlled descent.
At 90 cm/s, Rosetta is touching the comet at the same speed that the Philae lander did in November 2014. Back then, Philae bounced across the surface for hours before finally coming to rest. Opinion is divided about whether the same will happen to Rosetta today. Some think it will come gently to rest others expect some spacecraft acrobatics to take place.
But the kicker is that we will never know. The spacecraft will stop transmitting the moment it reaches the surface, and there are no telescopes on Earth powerful enough to see the comet’s surface in detail.
The countdown to the end of the mission is displayed on clocks throughout European mission control.
Today the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission comes to an end. Since August 2014, Rosetta has been studying comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko in order to better understand how the Earth formed, where the water in Earth’s oceans came from, and how the chemical building blocks of life were delivered to this planet.
Rosetta is the most ambitious space mission ever launched by Europe. Indeed, it is one of the most ambitious space missions any space agency has ever launched, and it has been full of drama.
The highpoint of the mission came in November 2014, when the Philae lander detached from the Rosetta mothership and made its descent onto the comet. A global audience watch as the lander tumbled across the surface before finally coming to rest in a crevice. Robbed of sunlight, scientists worked feverishly to complete its science mission before the batteries ran down and Philae ‘went to sleep’ three days later.
Since then, the main Rosetta spacecraft has been working, orbiting the comet and watching the way it is evaporated by the Sun. It has been making a chemical inventory that shows what molecules were delivered to the early Earth, and from which life formed.
Today the mission comes to an end with the main spacecraft itself touching down on the comet. Rosetta will not survive the landing but will gather even more data on the way down.
I’m here in ESA’s European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany. Rosetta is controlled from here, and it is the natural place to draw a line under the operational phase of this mission. I was here for the wake-up of the mission in 2014, and for the Philae landing. Now, it is the end.
Overnight the spacecraft executed a final manoeuvre that robbed it of orbital energy. It is now falling gently to its inevitable fate upon the dusty surface of the comet.
Touchdown is expected at around 12:20 BST.
During the course of today, I’ll be looking back at the mission and bringing you the details of what is going on. Plus, I’ll be talking to as many people as possible to bring you their reactions. To many here, the Rosetta mission has been a way of life. Today that way of life is ending.
Stay tuned.
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