What we have learnt from Rosetta’s 12-year, 7-billion-kilometre odyssey
PARIS — Europe’s Rosetta spacecraft, due to switch off on Friday after a 12-year odyssey, carried 11 scientific instruments to sniff, smell and photograph a comet from all angles.After arriving in orbit around comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, it launched Philae, a separate lander, which had another 10 hi-tech gadgets, including a drill that never deployed, but also cameras, X-ray scans and radio wave probes.Together, the robot explorers have advanced our understanding of comets, of which there are billions, believed to be leftovers from the birth of our Solar System about 4.6-billion years ago."Nobody had any idea comets can be so weird until Rosetta got there," said Fabio Favata of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) robotic exploration directorate.67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is currently 710-million kilometres from Earth.What the mission found:• Expecting to encounter something roughly the shape of an American football, scientists were flabbergasted to observe through Rosetta’s camera...
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