Europe's pioneering Rosetta spacecraft concluded a 12-year odyssey with a controlled crash-landing Friday onto the comet it has orbited and probed for two years to unravel the secrets of the Solar System's birth, mission controllers said.

Wild cheering erupted in the mission control centre in Darmstadt, as spacecraft operations manager Sylvain Lodiot announced the official end of mission.

One of the biggest dinosaur footprints ever recorded has been unearthed in the Gobi Desert, researchers said Friday, offering a fresh clue about the giant creatures that roamed the earth millions of years ago.

A joint Mongolian-Japanese expedition found the giant print, which measures 106 centimetres (42 inches) long and 77 centimetres wide.

It's serendipity: from America to Viagra, history is full of great discoveries helped along by chance, as more than a century of Nobel prizes can attest.

Among the chance discoveries that have been honoured with the prestigious prize are X-rays (physics, 1901), penicillin (medicine, 1945), fullerenes that paved the way for nanotechnology (chemistry, 1996), conductive polymers (chemistry, 2000), and the bacteria responsible for ulcers (medicine, 2005).

Europe's Rosetta spacecraft, due to switch off Friday after a 12-year odyssey, carried eleven scientific instruments to sniff and photograph a comet from all angles.

Street lighting in Reykjavik will be switched off for an hour Wednesday evening to give residents of the Icelandic capital a better view of the Aurora Borealis, city authorities said.

Most parts of the world's northernmost capital city, including the center, will go dark from 10:00 pm.

Europe's Rosetta spacecraft, due to switch off Friday (Sept 30) after a 12-year odyssey, carried eleven scientific instruments to sniff, smell and photograph a comet from all angles.

Russia on Saturday cancelled a planned manned space launch expected in one week due to "technical reasons," giving no explanation or a new launch date.

Tunisian and British researchers have unearthed Stone Age tools showing humans lived in southern Tunisia nearly 100,000 years ago, they said Thursday.

Britain will stay in the European Space Agency when it leaves the EU, but will have to renegotiate terms to continue participating in certain projects, the ESA said Wednesday.

The Gaia space probe, launched in 2013, has mapped more than a billion stars in the Milky Way, vastly expanding the inventory of known stars in our galaxy, the European Space Agency said Wednesday.

Released to eagerly waiting astronomers around the world, the initial catalogue of 1.15 billion stars is "both the largest and the most accurate full-sky map ever produced," said French astronomer Francois Mignard, a member of the 450-strong Gaia consortium.