The European Space Agency's comet lander might have died after just three days - but as we know, data recovered from space can yield insights long after the mission itself is over.
Take Apollo 12, for instance.
You might think that the second manned mission to the Moon - while remarkable even now - has given up all of the scientific secrets we could expect over the last 45 years.
Well not so, according to the UFO community, who claim to have spotted something… unusual in the depths of one of the photos from the mission.
Above: can you see it?
Now?
There it is.
The image was rediscovered by YouTube user Streetcap1, and hosted on UFO Sightings Daily. It shows, well, not much - a sort of sprite, perhaps a trick of the light or a camera artefact, or maybe an ALIEN CRAFT.
USD seems convinced - even though they seem to think Apollo 12 mission was unmanned and lasted four months longer than it actually did. Either way they've given it a 95% chance of being real.
There's a good discussion of the various real-life photographic issues relating to Apollo 12 here.
This is really just another image of the Copernicus crater, one of the most prominent on the moon. It's about 4km deep, 100km wide and there are many more images of it at the Astrosurf website.