Rosetta: mission to land on a comet
In 2014, the European Space Agency's Rosetta probe will enter orbit around a comet -- the first time this will have ever been done -- and then drop a lander on it -- and oh yeah, that's the first time this will have ever been done, too.
I'm pretty excited about this mission, and NASA and ESA have put together this really well-done video explaining the mission and what it'll do:
I found this on the Rosetta Blog which has been a great source of info over the years. Rosetta has already been a very successful mission without even having reached its target yet: it's swung by Mars, took stunning closeup images of the asteroid Lutetia, flew past another asteroid called Steins and got nifty pix of that, and also flew past Earth --
twice! three times! -- to steal some of our orbital energy to propel it on its way... and snapped one of my favorite pictures of Earth ever taken (seriously, click that link; have you ever seen a crescent Earth that beautiful?).And yet all that is a prelude to what's coming in a little over two year.