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Originally Posted by sil
Very disappointed that missions are destroyed. Why not leave the probes/oribters/etc out there and let others take over recording data? it could be a way for other countries, universities, teams to get into space exploration without using relying on government owned earth infrastructure.
Amateurs have always tried to track things like sputnick and voyager so if you open up the expensive hardware to the public people will get something together.
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I think there are different reasons why different missions are ended with a still working spacecraft. I think in this case it's almost out of fuel and once they can no longer control it, if they don't crash it, it will just drift in an orbit similar to the comet, but getting further away, and it will spend the next few hundred (thousand?) years not really anywhere near anything interesting. It doesn't have enough fuel to remain in the vicinity of 67P much longer let alone to change its orbit anywhere near enough to enable a flyby of anything else we know of. Also the extra little bit of unique data they'll get from a controlled descent (slow crash) is probably worth more to them than the vague possibility of something interesting at some time in the future.
For something like Cassini, Juno, or Galileo, they are destroyed (burnt up entering Jupiter/Saturn atmosphere) at the end of the mission because they don't want to lose control and potentially have the spacecraft crash into, and contaminate, one of the potentially life friendly moons like Titan, Enceladus, Europa, etc.
It's a shame, I agree, but I'm sure they wouldn't do it if they thought they could get more science out of them. Plus we've got enough orbital debris around our own planet and I think it's good that we're not just leaving junk whizzing around the Solar System unless it's necessary
