Europe’s Rosetta

Europe's pioneering spacecraft Rosetta is heading for a crash landing on the comet it has stalked for two years, a dramatic end to a 12-year odyssey to demystify the Solar System's origins. With the comet zipping through space at a speed of over nine miles per second, Rosetta was programmed to make a "controlled impact" at human walking speed, about 90 cm (35 inches) per second. The first-ever mission to orbit and land on a comet was approved in 1993 to explore the birth of the Solar System 4.6 billion years ago. Rosetta and lander probe Philae travelled more than six billion kilometres over 10 years to reach 67P in August 2014. Philae was released onto the comet surface in November of that year, bouncing several times, then gathering 60 hours of on-site data which it sent home before entering standby mode. Comets like 67P are thought to contain primordial material preserved in a dark space deep freeze. Insights gleaned from the 1.4-billion-euro ($1.5-billion) project have shown that comets crashing into an early Earth may well have brought amino acids, the building blocks of life.