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Unless Matt Damon becomes stranded on Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko any time soon and needs an emergency means of calling back to Earth, the world will never hear from the Rosetta spacecraft again. But the European vehicle served humanity well since its launch 12 years ago. Rosetta became the first probe to both orbit a comet and deploy a lander to a comet's surface. On Friday morning, the spacecraft joined its small lander, Philae, on the surface of its comet. Once there, it shut down.

Even before the European Space Agency’s Giotto spacecraft came within 600km of the nucleus of Halley’s Comet in 1986, the agency was already thinking about a comet lander as a follow-up mission. After finally launching in 2004, Rosetta took a long time to reach Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. The probe had to make four flybys of inner solar system planets (three around Earth, one around Mars) for gravitational assists, and it traveled nearly eight billion km before descending to rest on the comet Friday. The gallery above captures some of the highlights of the 12-year mission.

From a scientific standpoint, Rosetta confirms that comets are remnants from when the Solar System formed, rather than fragments from later collisions. Comets therefore offer a window to 4.6 billion years ago. The program was a public relations success, too. “As well as being a scientific and technical triumph, the amazing journey of Rosetta and its lander Philae also captured the world’s imagination, engaging new audiences far beyond the science community,” said Mark McCaughrean, ESA’s senior science adviser.

Colossal, a modern take on kaiju films starring Anne Hathaway, officially enjoys wide release in the US starting today (4/7/17). Ars was lucky enough to catch the film early at last fall's genre-centric Fantastic Fest 2016, and we're resurfacing our review (which originally ran on 10/1/16) accordingly.

Warning: This review contains minor spoilers for Colossal.

AUSTIN, Texas—The film Colossal currently doesn't have a publicly-available trailer, let alone a release date. But it aired at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this month, sparking hurried whispers of "Anne Hathaway's kaiju movie" among #FilmInternet. Those four words made up all the prior knowledge I had when the title slid into this week's genre-centric Fantastic Fest for its US premiere.

Having seen it, I can now confirm: Anne Hathaway appears in this film, so does a kaiju monster. But pitching Colossal as Hathaway taking the Bryan Cranston role in the most recent Godzilla sells writer/director Nacho Vigalondo's latest work so, so short. Instead, Colossal proves to be an incredibly fun mishmash of well-established genres with two extremely accessible characters at its core. Over the course of 110 minutes, things shift fluidly between rom-com and monster film, dark horror and art-house indie. All the while, Colossal does its best kaiju impression, leaving tropes of each mashed in its path.

Everyone's from a Mainline, USA

Burnt-out online writer Gloria (Anne Hathaway) has been losing the eternal battle with NYC. She drinks too much, works not enough, and may be involved in an emotionally abusive relationship with Tim, a successful suit-type. It all comes to a breaking point after one too many midday, inebriated return trips to their apartment. Tim has Gloria's bags packed and ready for departure.

Enlarge (credit: Nate Anderson)

Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games. Check out our complete board gaming coverage at cardboard.arstechnica.com.

Terraforming Mars is a board game inspired by Kim Stanley Robinson's hard sci-fi "Mars trilogy." Though not endorsed by the author, Sweden's Jacob Fryxelius has enlisted his family members to produce a science-driven game that is pure homage to Robinson's classic series; even the players in the manual's examples are named "Kim," "Stanley," and "Robinson."

The goal is simple: make Mars habitable. Forget Matt Damon as the primitive first "Martian"; Terraforming Mars takes place much further in the future and unfolds over centuries, ending with a green and blue map of a Red Planet covered with cities, vegetation, and oceans.

Enlarge / Mars or bust! (credit: NASA)

If Elon Musk has his way, humans will be going to the red planet—and soon. Over the past few days, our senior space-master Eric Berger has analyzed Musk’s Interplanetary Transport System plans in detail, and our chief scientist Dr. John Timmer has examined the science of how to generate resources on Mars. But Musk’s thoughts for getting to and living on Mars—both the nitty-gritty details and also the glossed-over blank bits—still come across to many folks as science fiction. It’s all well and good to talk about building an enormous rocket and a self-sustaining Martian colony, but it’s another thing entirely to do it.

So who better to discuss the differences between science and science fiction than an actual science fiction author—one who studied up for years on the problems of surviving on Mars before crafting a cracking good story about how exactly it might work? And as it happens, we know the perfect such person: author Andy Weir, whose best-selling novel The Martian (and the subsequent Ridley Scott movie) covers much of the same ground Musk wants to cover—though Musk is dreaming on a much larger scale.

Author Andy Weir and hat. (credit: Lee Hutchinson)

“In-situ resource generation”

Though Musk and SpaceX envision a long-term plan that involves thousands of launches to Mars, the company wants to bring most of those spacecraft back to Earth—otherwise, as Musk explained, we’d end up with a gigantic “spacecraft graveyard” littering Mars. This leaves us with two options: the Martian spacecraft have to bring their return fuel with them, or they have to generate it somehow on Mars (“in situ,” as the terminology goes). Since every gram of mass going to Mars must be paid for in fuel (including the mass of the fuel itself), generating the fuel on Mars is highly preferable to hauling all that fuel with you and paying the mass penalty for it.