Rosetta orbiter will soon crash into its comet and vanish

IN JUST a few days, the Rosetta orbiter will end its two-year mission by crash landing on Comet 67P/ChuryumovGerasimenko.

The European Space Agency spacecraft will join its illfated lander Philae, which was recently located after dying and evading detection for nearly two years after its historic landing on the comet’s surface.

As Comet 67P’s orbit takes it farther away from the sun, Rosetta’s solar panels are exposed to less and less light to use as energy. The mission team considered putting Rosetta back into hibernation until the comet swings back around in four or five years the spacecraft slept for part of its journey to the comet, waking back up as it came close to the lump of primordial dirt and ice – but have decided that the risk of Rosetta failing to wake up is too great to justify extending the mission.

“There’s no point putting an old experiment with old (principal investigators) into hibernation,” mission scientist Kathrin Altwegg joked to Nature in 2015.

But Rosetta will be doing science until her last moments: On Sept 30, the robot will descend to a mysterious cometary region known as Ma’at. Located on the smaller of 67P’s two lobes, Ma’at is home to several “active pits.”

Comets like 67P are mainly studied because of the materials locked away in their icy cores: These objects formed at the dawn of the solar system, and their far-flung orbits have kept the sun from degrading those original building blocks.

Scientists hope that studying these pristine materials can help unlock the secrets of the early solar system.

“The heat of the sun, spreading through the comet, warms underground deposits of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide ice,” Mark McCaughrean, a senior science adviser at ESA, told the Guardian. “These deposits then evaporate, leaving caverns whose roofs collapse. Inside them, you can see features we call goosebumps or dragon’s eggs that could be primordial objects from which the comet formed. So we’re taking Rosetta down to study these.”

After finishing up one final flyover on Sept 24, Rosetta will begin a series of course corrections designed to send her down into a pit dubbed Deir el-Medina. She’ll go slowly slowly enough to send home pictures of the mysterious pit – but the impact is still expected to damage the spacecraft enough to end communications with Earth.

“That will be the end of Rosetta,” McCaughrean told the Guardian.