Twenty years ago, in the night between 13 and 14 March 1986, ESA’s Giotto spacecraft encountered Comet Halley. It was ESA’s first deep space mission, and part of an ambitious international effort to ...

As the Giotto spacecraft and Halley’s comet raced toward each other last week at a closing speed of 155,000 m.p.h., the tension at the European Space Agency’s control center in Darmstadt, West Germany ...

Twenty-five years ago, ESA made its mark in deep space. A small spacecraft swept to within 600 km of Halley’s comet. The Giotto probe was nearly destroyed by the encounter but what it saw changed our ...