Birthplace of Rosetta Probe's Comet Pinned Down

The comet that Europe's Rosetta spacecraft orbited for more than two years was probably born in the realm of icy bodies beyond Neptune, a new study suggests. New analyses of the orbit of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko — on which Rosetta intentionally crash-landed on Sept. 30, ending the probe's historic mission — trace the object's origins back to the Kuiper Belt, whose most famous denizen is Pluto. "These results come from computations of the comet's orbit from the present to the past, which is computationally difficult due to the chaosity of the orbit caused by close encounters with Jupiter," Mattia Galiazzo, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Western University in Ontario, Canada, said in a statement.