This adorable video about the Rosetta comet mission will make you cry
Europe's Rosetta mission officially ended Friday when the spacecraft purposefully crashed into its comet after spending two year orbiting the icy object in deep space.
As the mission came to its end, the European Space Agency (ESA) released a moving, adorable cartoon video showing an animated version of Rosetta's final moments.
In the two-minute short, you can see Rosetta slowly descend to the surface of its comet, softly touching down not far from the Philae lander sleeping silently nearby.
You May Also Like
Philae became the first human-made spacecraft to softly land on the surface of a comet in November 2014, but its life was short. The washing machine sized robot landed in an unexpected part of Comet 67P after bouncing on its surface, coming to rest in a lopsided position that only allowed it enough battery life to beam back data for a couple of days.
The lander and Rosetta orbiter sped to Comet 67P together after launching from Earth in 2004.
The animated Philae's adventurous attitude and cartoon Rosetta's studious nature have entertained people tracking the mission for some time, gaining a fair bit of notoriety among space fans.
The ESA has been releasing videos featuring the two cartoon spacecraft friends for some years now, with the two official Twitter handles for the robots taking on the personalities of their cartoon counterparts.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
Now, the two intrepid space robots are reunited on Comet 67P's surface, presumably until the comet breaks apart in its orbit around the sun.
But the new Rosetta video has a different vision of the future for the orbiter and Philae.
The end of the animated short shows two human explorers showing up near Comet 67P and spotting Rosetta and Philae covered in cosmic dust years in the future.
The two animated humans actually look quite similar to the characters in a live action film released by the ESA earlier on in Rosetta's mission.
That video, featuring Aidan Gillen of Game of Thrones fame, transports viewers to a science fiction world far in the future when Rosetta's story is spoken of as legend.
Miriam Kramer worked as a staff writer for Space.com for about 2.5 years before joining Mashable to cover all things outer space. She took a ride in weightlessness on a zero-gravity flight and watched rockets launch to space from places around the United States. Miriam received her Master's degree in science, health and environmental reporting from New York University in 2012, and she originally hails from Knoxville, Tennessee. Follow Miriam on Twitter at @mirikramer.
