ESA preparing Rosetta orbiter for final mission– crashing and dying

After around two years of studying Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, the European Space Agency’s Rosetta craft is set to begin its deliberate crash landing onto the icy comet.

The probe still has a lot of scientific value. ESA investigators are trying to squeeze every last bit of data from their mission, including the data that will be gathered just before Rosetta slams into the comet.

Mission scientists have targeted a region of Comet 67P covered with “active pits” as the ideal scientific target for the probe’s crash landing. The region, known as Ma’at, has pits greater than 320 feet wide and 160 to 200 feet deep where the comet’s dust jets originate.

The sides of the pits were seen to have yard-long lumpy structures dubbed ‘goosebumps’, which researchers suspect might be the signatures of early ‘cometesimals’ that lumped together to produce the comet in the early stages of Solar System development.

Rosetta will get its nearest peek yet at these intriguing structures on September 30 when it lands near a 420-foot wide pit the mission team has informally named Deir el-Medina, after a structure with a very similar look in an ancient Egyptian town of the same name. Like the archaeological artifacts discovered in an ancient Egyptian, the comet’s pit has clues to the geological background of the area.

Since early August, Rosetta has been orbiting progressively closer to the comet. On its nearest flyby, it is projected to come within 1 kilometer of the comet’s surface.

“Although we’ve been flying Rosetta around the comet for two years now, keeping it operating safely for the final weeks of the mission in the unpredictable environment of this comet and so far from the Sun and Earth, will be our biggest challenge yet,” Sylvain Lodiot, ESA’s spacecraft operations manager, said in a statement. “We are already feeling the difference in the gravitational pull of the comet as we fly closer and closer: it is increasing the spacecraft’s orbital period, which has to be corrected by small maneuvers. But this is why we have these flyovers, stepping down in small increments to be robust against these issues when we make the final approach.”

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Image credit: ESA

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