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Philae is a robotic European Space Agency lander that accompanies its Rosetta spacecraft. It is designed to land on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko shortly after arrival in 2014. The lander is named after Philae island in the Nile, where an obelisk was found that was used along with the Rosetta Stone to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphic.
Just as the Philae(*) Obelisk and the Rosetta Stone provided the keys to an ancient civilisation, the Philae lander and the Rosetta orbiter aim to unlock the mysteries of the oldest building blocks of our Solar System - comets.
(*) Philae is the island in the river Nile on which an obelisk was found that had a bilingual inscription including the names of Cleopatra and Ptolemy in Egyptian hieroglyphs. This provided the French historian Jean-François Champollion with the final clues that enabled him to decipher the hieroglyphs of the Rosetta Stone and unlock the secrets of the civilisation of ancient Egypt.
