The Rosetta probe concludes mission: be the star with the comet which continued for years – Expansion MX

BERLIN (Reuters) –

The space probe Rosetta completed on Friday their historic mission, crashing against the surface of a comet to which he was chasing for 12 years, in a mission that provided knowledge about the early days of the solar system.

The ship continued to the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko for more than 6,000 million kilometers of space, to gather a great deal of information about comets, which keep you busy to the experts for the next 10 years.

Scientists at the control center of the European Space Agency (ESA, for its acronym in English) in Darmstadt, Germany, cheered and hugged after that came the confirmation of the end of the mission at 06:19 time of that city.

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“Thanks, Rosetta,” he wrote on Twitter the director general of ESA, Jan Woerner, after it was confirmed the maneuver.

Woerner was one of the 300 people who gathered before dawn in a conference room at the International Congress of Astronautics held in Guadalajara, Mexico, to view a live signal of the disappearance of the signal from Rosetta in the monitors, simultaneously with the team in Germany.

“it Was a good final,” said Klaus Schiling, who worked on the plan of the mission Rosetta 27 years ago with the prime contractor, Airbus. “There were many high and low points in this mission.”

The program achieved several historical milestones, such as putting a probe in orbit around a comet and the landing of another device on the surface of the celestial body. Probes earlier took photographs and collected data for flights close to their objectives.

however, we could not obtain more data, because the lander, Philae bounced several times on the surface of the comet before you get stuck next to a cliff, without being able to perform experiments beyond the three days that lasted their batteries powered by solar energy.