“I didn’t realise it was going to be this intense,” says Taylor.

He looks more relaxed than I’ve seen him in months, sat at his desk at Estec surrounded by books and scientific papers. On his windowsill is a row of plastic bath ducks, alongside a model of the comet. The wall is covered with diagrams of the spacecraft and drawings from his children.

“Family life, personal life, health is destroyed in some ways but my family knows it’s not going to last forever,” he says. “My kids have become engaged in what I do,” Taylor says. “For once they’ve started to say, ‘Dad’s quite cool!’”

In the office across the corridor, Jansen has stepped down from his role as mission manager.

“It has been too intense,” says Jansen. “There was no break, there were no weekends, you were working all the time.

“The last thing I did late at night was answer emails and you start again at six in the morning doing the same thing,” he adds.

Nevertheless both agree, without hesitation, that the mission has been worth the effort.

Over the past few months the first science results have started to come in, including studies of the comet’s water, magnetic field, dust and chemical composition. Comets are believed to be the oldest objects in the Solar System and 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko provides scientists with a time machine into the past – before the Sun and planets were fully formed.

But it will take years to analyse the vast amount of data returned by Philae and still being generated by Rosetta.

As it approached the Sun, the comet’s surface began to warm and an increasing amount of gas and dust was vented into space. This caused problems for Rosetta and its support team on Earth. The orbiter recently went into a "safe mode" when its navigation system became confused by the dust.

On 14 June 2015, it was announced that Philae, which had lain dormant for months, sparked back into life. The mission’s control centre received its first message from the lander since its batteries ran dry last November. Philae is expected to send large amounts of data it had collected before going silent last year, giving the scientists back on Earth more insight into the comet.

“People ask me what the cost is of Rosetta and I say one billion euros,” says Accomazzo, “and they say ‘wow!’ but Ronaldo cost 100 million euros, Real Madrid costs much more than Rosetta every season – it’s definitely worth flying something like this.”

The final word goes to the man who started it all, Gerhard Schwehm. Now retired, the former head of the mission spends much of his time compiling a history of the project.