As I write this, the Rosetta mission has been an apparent success! The lander has touched down on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, a first in the history of space exploration.
The lander has completed an incredible journey, traveling more than 300,000,000 miles away from Earth. It and the comet are traveling at about 83,000 miles per hour. It did a flyby of Mars and in January was taken out of a 31-month hibernation mode. It is estimated that in the mission's decade-long history, some 2,000 people assisted in the mission.
Rosetta's mission now transitions into a different kind of search. No longer looking for a comet, it's now looking for possible organic compounds on the comet. Observations made previously have shown that comets contain complex organic compounds. Those molecules are known to be rich in hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon. There's a theory that says comets once delivered water to Earth, and may have even seeded Earth with organic molecules.
Rosetta will also search for nucleic acids, which are the building blocks of DNA and RNA. This mission, therefore, may go very far in assessing the contribution that comets made to the beginnings of life as we know it.
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