Mission scientist reacts to historic first images from the surface of a comet

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.

The nucleus of the largest known comet in the Solar System, C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli–Bernstein), has been measured by the Hubble Space Telescope to be 129 kilometres across.

The European Space Agency’s Philae lander captured this blurred view during its first bounce after first contacting the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in November.