All things come to an end, and with the Philae comet lander, it appears to be coming all too soon. On Thursday, mission leaders had been extremely cautious—wary of using moving parts for fear of upsetting the precarious position of the three-legged robot, which is wedged in and tipped up on its

After the Philae probe bounced its way to a tenuous, unanchored perch on a comet—a bittersweet victory for the European Space Agency (ESA) and its Rosetta mission—Fred Jansen cried in the control room. Hours later, Jansen, the Rosetta project manager at ESA’s European Space Research and Technology

The comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which the Rosetta spacecraft is now orbiting, is by all accounts a fascinating chunk of dust and ice. This week, scientists using the spacecraft’s high-resolution camera presented some staggering images of the duck-shaped comet at a planetary science conference