Chase a frozen mountain across deep space for ten years, drop a lander onto it, then watch in horror as the lander bounces off and disappears into the dark. Yet a decade after it ended, this mission’s data is rewriting the history of Earth’s oceans.

This deep dive follows the European Space Agency’s Rosetta, the first spacecraft to orbit and soft-land on a comet. We explore the near-disasters, the mind-bending science, and the profound question at its heart: was the water in your glass delivered to Earth by a frozen rock like Comet 67P billions of years ago?

• The years of gravity-assist flybys, including the billion-euro Mars gamble where Rosetta survived 15 minutes in shadow on untested batteries
• The duck-shaped comet, Philae’s failed harpoons and double bounce, and how it still achieved 80 percent of its science goals in 72 hours
• The eerie singing comet and how the song came from solar wind hitting the comet’s plasma, not a magnetized core
• The 2024 reanalysis that corrected a measurement error and flipped the water findings, reopening the comet-ocean theory
• The chirality mystery, the discovery of glycine, and Rosetta’s poetic final plunge into the region named Sais