With the Rosetta orbiter and lander, the European Space Agency (ESA) is ready to take the lead in the race to discover exactly what makes up a comet.

Scientists say that landing on a comet and analyzing its surface are major scientific milestones that could vastly improve our understanding of the origin of the Sun and the planets, including Earth.

Previous studies by ESA’s Giotto spacecraft and by observatories have shown that comets contain what are considered the building blocks for life — the elements carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen.

Rosetta will allow scientists to look back 4,600 million years to an epoch when no planets existed in our solar system and only a vast swarm of asteroids and comets surrounded the Sun.

The Rosetta lander, called Philae, is provided by a European consortium headed by the German Aerospace Research Center (DLR). With a contribution of approximately 280 million Eur ($347 million), Germany is making the largest financial contribution in the circa 1 bn Eur ($1.24bn) mission. Mission Control is located at DLR in Cologne.

The Rosetta mission, whose launch had been postponed a number of times, will take ten years to travel through the solar system before reaching the comet, a large dirty snowball known as 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

At its furthest point, Rosetta will be 1bn kilometers from Earth. Once at the comet, Rosetta will become the first mission to orbit a comet’s nucleus, and its lander Philae will be the first to ultimately set foot on a comet.

Rosetta will orbit the comet for an entire year as it approaches the Sun. The lander will also take photographs and analyze the comet’s composition. As the comet’s ice evaporates, instruments on board the orbiter will study the dust and gas particles which surround the comet and its trail, as well as the tail’s interaction with the solar wind.

The orbiter’s scientific payload includes 11 experiments and the small landing mechanism, which is equipped with its own payload of scientific instruments.