An Ariane 5 sent Rosetta on a decade-long path that looped past Earth three times and Mars once.
Ariane 5 flight 158 lifted off from Kourou at 07:17:51 UTC on 2 March 2004 and released Rosetta at 09:32:36 UTC [3]. Gravity assists at Earth (2005, 2007, 2009) and Mars (25 February 2007) shaped the trajectory, and the spacecraft imaged the asteroids Steins (2008) and Lutetia (2010) along the way [1].
From 8 June 2011 Rosetta spent 31 months in deep-space hibernation, at distances of up to about 800 million km from the Sun, before waking up on 20 January 2014 [1, 2].
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