ROSETTA’S JOURNEY ENDS WITH CRASH INTO ICY COMET

After 12 years of hurtling through space in pursuit of a comet, the Rosetta probe ended its mission Friday with a slow-motion crash onto the icy surface of the alien world it was sent out to study.

Mission controllers lost contact with the probe, as expected, after it hit the surface of comet 67P/ Churyumov-Gerasimenko at 4:39 a.m. Mountain time Friday, the European Space Agency said.

“Farewell Rosetta, you’ve done the job,” said mission manager Patrick Martin. “That is space science at its best.”

ESA chief Jan Woerner called the $1.57 billion mission a success. Aside from sending a lander onto the surface of comet 67P in November 2014 — a cosmic first — the Rosetta mission has collected vast amounts of data that researchers will spend many years analyzing.

Spectacular images taken by the orbiter and its comet lander revealed a desert-like landscape on the comet with wide, featureless regions but also high cliffs and sinkholes that were more than a hundred yards across.

One of the crucial differences between Rosetta and previous missions was the probe’s ability to study one comet for an extended period of time. While Deep Impact fired a projectile into comet Tempel 1 back in 2005 and studied the crater for 15 minutes, Rosetta spent 786 days flying alongside 67P.