Scientists bid farewell to Rosetta space probe
BERLIN— Scientists began saying their final farewells to the Rosetta space probe Thursday, hours before its planned crash-landing on a comet, but said that data collected during the mission would provide discoveries for many years to come.
The spacecraft, launched in 2004, took a decade to reach comet 67P/ Churyumov-Gerasimenko, where it released a smaller probe called Philae that performed the first comet landing in November 2014.
With almost two dozen scientific instruments between them, Rosetta and its lander gathered a wealth of data about 67P that have already given researchers significant new insights into the composition of comets and the formation of celestial bodies.
“The best thing is we still haven’t gone through all our data,” said Mohamed El-Maarry, a researcher at the University of Bern, Switzerland.
El-Maarry said OSIRIS, the main camera on board the probe, had captured some 80,000 images, many of which have yet to be analyzed fully.
A few more will be added during Rosetta’s final hours, as the European Space Agency steers the probe toward the comet so it can take unprecedented close-up images before colliding with the icy surface.
Other instruments were used to “sniff” for molecules on the comet and examine its insides with radar. Among the key findings was the discovery of molecular oxygen on the comet, forcing scientists to reconsider previous assumptions guiding the search for alien life.
“Gaining knowledge is not always about finding answers to questions,” said Bjorn Davidsson, who works at the California Institute of Technology’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. “The first step of knowledge is to start to ask the right questions. So maybe that is the step we are in now, that we are finally starting to understand the problems so much that we start to ask the right questions.”