Comets are Nice to Touch

Abstract

Rosetta is the third cornerstone mission of the European Space Agency scientific program "Horizon 2000" and it is the first spacecraft to orbit around a comet nucleus and to send a lander on its surface with the aim of studying the real nature of these objects. It was launched in March 2004 and reached the comet 67P/Churymov-Gerasimenko in 2014. Its lander Philae was released on 12 November 2014 and landed on the comet surface to start the in-situ investigation. Philae then acted as an independent spacecraft, as it is provided with all subsystems needed to survive and work alone on the comet. This paper describes Rosetta mission and summarizes its first scientific results based on both observations from the orbiter and in-situ measurements from the lander.