A tenuous path to a comet: the Rosetta mission in photos

Rosetta left earth in 2004, whipped around it three times to gain speed, and caught up to a comet called 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko (both seen above, in a photo taken by Rosetta's lander). On Nov. 12, 2014, the spacecraft dropped a lander onto the comet's surface. Here's the decade-long journey in photographs.