Europe’s Philae spacecraft is set to go for landing on a comet, a never-before-tried maneuver that includes a perilous seven-hour descent and an uncontrolled touchdown.

This animation shows Comet Siding Spring’s path as it comes within 132,000 kilometres (82,000 miles) of Mars on 19 October 2014.

Europe’s Rosetta spacecraft will close out a historic 4.9-billion-mile journey Friday with a slow-speed crash into the nucleus of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the tiny world it has studied for the last two years, capturing some of the mission’s best science data to help unravel the inner workings of the comet. Confirmation of the crash landing should arrive on Earth around 1218 BST.