On this day: 2 July 1985, ESA’s Giotto spacecraft was launched on the tenth Ariane 1 (flight V14), from Kourou, French Guiana. Making encounters with comets Halley in 1986 and Grigg–Skjellerup in 1992, Giotto was ESA’s first deep-space mission. It imaged a comet nucleus for the first time and found the first evidence of organic material on a comet.
