Goodnight, Rosetta

On Sep. 30, 2016, the Rosetta mission came to a close. At 11:19 UTC, the radio signal received at Earth from the spacecraft was cut off when the orbiter became a lander, slowly impacting and coming to rest on the surface of a comet. At that moment, it became more than it once was; it became a part of the comet it had been chasing since it was launched on Mar. 2, 2004. It was August 2014 when Rosetta first approached and made rendezvous with 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, a chunk of ice and rock and ...