Credit: ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDAView

After a decade in space and 4 billion miles, Europe’s Rosetta spacecraft has made history: For the first time ever, a robotic probe from Earth is flying with a comet and will soon enter orbit.

The European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft arrived at its target, Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, today (Aug. 6) to end a 10-year journey across the solar system. The spacecraft performed an engine burn that brought it about 62 miles (100 kilometers) from the comet’s surface.

Comet 67P/C-G and Rosetta are now flying about 251 million miles (450 million kilometers) from Earth. Engineers on the ground had to program the probe to go through a series of complicated burns and maneuvers to make the spacecraft’s rendezvous with the comet a possibility. [Photos: Europe’s Rosetta Comet Mission in Pictures]

“This is the end of 10 years of interplanetary flight,” Rosetta Flight Director Andrea Accomazzo said during ESA’s live comet rendezvous webcast Wednesday.

Applause broke out in Rosetta’s mission control center in Darmstadt, Germany, where a crowd of ESA dignitaries and officials had gathered to watch the historic event.

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A sketch of a printable 3-D model of 433 Eros. Credit: NASA

How would it feel like to hold an asteroid or spacecraft in your hands? NASA is giving you that chance through a special website that includes 3-D printable models of various things, ranging from the asteroid Eros to the Rosetta spacecraft, which is going to make an epic rendezvous with a comet in just a couple of weeks.

NASA’s 3D resources website now includes nearly two dozen models, including several released in the past few weeks. You can print out Curiosity’s landing site (Gale Crater), or perhaps the Voyager spacecraft that is further away than anything else humanity has sent out into the universe, or any other number of locations or hardware.

So if you learn best by using your hands, here’s your big chance to have some fun. Or to entertain the kids during summer vacation, if you can get access to a community or personal printer!

via A Whole New World: How NASA Helps You 3-D Print The Universe.