Just before settling to a soft crash landing Friday, the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft captured close-range images of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, peering into a stadium-sized pit and recording a final dataset to keep scientists busy long after the mission’s end.
The craft’s OSIRIS science camera took images throughout Rosetta’s descent and sent the data back to Earth in real-time.
The final image came from an altitude of 65 feet (20 meters) above the comet, just before ground controllers received the last signal from Rosetta at 1119 GMT (7:19 a.m. EDT).
Holger Sierks, the OSIRIS instrument’s principal investigator, discussed the photos in a presentation Friday at the European Space Operations Center in Darmstadt, Germany.
Rosetta set down next to an open pit named Deir el-Medina, a feature resembling a sinkhole measuring about 330 feet (100 meters) wide and 165 feet (50 meters) deep. In the final image sequence, the spacecraft turned to look inside the pit, revealing debris strewn across the bottom, material scientists believe fell away from the pit’s frozen walls.
Pits like Deir el-Medina, named for an archaeological site in Egypt, are a likely source for jets of dust and vapor that streamed away from the comet last year.
NASA’s Dawn spacecraft is tantalizing scientists with new imagery of Ceres, a dwarf planet orbiting the sun between Mars and Jupiter, as the probe closes in on the icy world for 16 months of up-close observations.
As NASA turns up support for future commercial lunar landers, the space agency last week canceled a mission that would have placed a rover on the moon to survey resources, such as water and helium, that could be used by future human explorers.
NASA’s senior manager in charge of the development of the James Webb Space Telescope, Eric Smith, recently spoke with Spaceflight Now about the decision to reschedule its launch from October 2018 to the spring of 2019.