Rosetta

By studying the logs of computer malfunctions caused by high-energy particles striking their circuitry, ESA scientists have used "housekeeping" data from the Rosetta and Mars Express deep-space probes to shed new light on cosmic rays in the solar system.

Phosphorus has been detected on a comet, thus completing the list of life-essential elements found on these cosmic snowballs. The discovery made in data from the Rosetta probe strengthens the idea that life’s ingredients were delivered to Earth by comets.

While comet flybys had been performed before, at the outset of the ESA’s Rosetta mission to the 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko nobody had ever entered orbit around a comet, let alone try to land on one.

Images sent back by ESA's Rosetta probe show that it wasn't only thing orbiting comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (67P/C-G). A comparison of images taken four years ago when the comet was closest to the Sun shows a piece of debris about 4 m (13 ft) in diameter circling 67P/C-G like a mini-moon.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has completed a massive publicly-available archive of almost 100,000 images and a mass of data collected over the course of the historic Rosetta mission.

An all-star cast of spacecraft has teamed up from across the Solar System. After a CME erupted from the Sun in October 2014, its journey through space was tracked by Curiosity, Rosetta, Cassini, New Horizons and possibly even Voyager 2, allowing astronomers to study the phenomenon in detail.

It's been a busy year in space with new Mars missions launched, a NASA probe saying hello to Jupiter, and humanity's most ambitious comet exploration mission drawing to a close.

Using statistical computer analysis, astronomers from Western University have reconstructed the orbit of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko and say that it's a recent visitor to the inner Solar system from the Kuiper Belt.

An almost two-year-long cosmic search party has come to an end, with scientists at the European Space Agency spying their Philae comet lander wedged into the dark crack on the surface of 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

The unmanned Rosetta probe has revealed that comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko has a daily water cycle that, according to ESA, keeps it "alive."

ESA’s Philae comet lander has once again gone silent. According to the space agency, the first spacecraft to make a soft landing on a comet lost radio contact with the Rosetta orbiter mothership on July 9.

Modern deep space probes may be among the most sophisticated pieces of hardware the 21st century can produce, but the Rosetta space probe was thrown into safe mode recently when it was unable to take a simple star fix due to comet dust.