This Image Is the Final Moment of Humanity's First Visit to a Comet

One More Shot

In September 2016, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Rosetta spacecraft crashed into Comet 67P, bringing an end to 12 years of service — or so the ESA thought. While they believed they had already received Rosetta's final image of the comet, the organization recently discovered one more, revealing the true final moment before impact.

The image previously thought to be Rosetta's last was taken from a height of about 23.3 to 26.2 meters (76 to 86 feet), but the ESA estimates that this new image was taken from about 18 to 21 meters (59 to 68 feet) above the comet's surface. They claim it captures an area of about one square meter (10 square feet).

Lasting Impression

When Rosetta purposefully set itself on a crash course with 67P, it transmitted the last of its images in six separate packets. However, due to an unexpected transmission interruption, only three made it back to Earth.

"Later, we found a few telemetry packets on our server and thought, wow, that could be another image," said Holger Sierks, principal investigator for the OSIRIS camera at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen, Germany, in a statement.

The craft transmits images in layers, with each new layer adding detail to the image, so Sierks and his team had to assemble Rosetta's final image one layer at a time. The ESA notes that while some of the finer details were lost, the final result is a zoomed-in shot of the spot Rosetta is thought to have impacted.

This may be the last we see from Rosetta, but it's a fittingly unexpected end for a spacecraft that contributed so much to space exploration while traversing our solar system for more than a decade.