Rosetta's lander named Philae With just 21 days until the launch
of the European Space Agency's ESA Rosetta comet mission, the
spacecraft's lander has been named "Philae" by a 15 year-old
Italian girl. Rosetta will embark on a 10 year journey to Comet
Churyumov-Gerasimenko from Kourou, French Guiana on 26th
February 2004. 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-Francois Champollion with the
final clues that allowed him to translate the hieroglyphs of the
Rosetta Stone and unlock the secrets of the civilisation of
ancient Egypt. Just as the Philae Obelisk and the Rosetta Stone
provided the keys to an ancient civilization, the Philae Lander
and the Rosetta Orbiter will unlock the mysteries of the oldest
building blocks of our Solar System – the comets. Germany,
France, Italy and Hungary are the main contributors to the
Lander working together