ON 30 September, if all goes to plan, the Rosetta spacecraft will perform a spectacular belly-flop on to comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, ending its 12-year odyssey.
Rosetta has been faithfully escorting the comet through the solar system for the past two years, even planting its companion, the Philae lander, on the comet鈥檚 icy surface forever. Upon arriving in August 2014, it quickly unveiled a surprise finding: its quarry contains complex organic material and primordial chunks left over from the solar system鈥檚 formation.
We had thought comets were dirty snowballs or icy dirtballs, but Rosetta has changed that view, says team member Eberhard Gr眉n of the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, Germany. 鈥淣ow we know them, or at least this one, to be geologically complex worlds where a myriad of processes are at work,鈥� he said in a statement.
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Rosetta will take data right up until the moment of its impact. It is meant to crash into a region of active pits on the comet鈥檚 鈥渉ead鈥�, where dust jets originate.
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淐omet crashdown鈥�