by Mariëtte Le Roux
When Europe’s comet chaser was launched in 2004, it boasted the name of the famous Rosetta stone, which had helped decipher hieroglyphics, the mysterious written language of the ancient Egyptians.
The moniker was chosen because Rosetta, the spacecraft, would also be a decoder — unravelling the mysteries of comets, which are clusters of ice and dust left over from the formation of the Solar System some 4.6 billion years ago.
Scientists believe comets shed light on how life on Earth came about.
In more than two years orbiting Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which included placing the first ever lander on a comet surface, Rosetta has lived up to its cryptographer epithet, though many more secrets remain to be teased from the data unearthed.
The name also set the trend for naming aspects of the mission after Egyptian place names, gods or kings.
Here are some other names:
AGILKIA
The site on the comet where Rosetta’s Philae lander was meant to touch down in November 2014. The spot was named for an island on the Nile which became the new home of Pharaonic temples transferred from Philae, another island, when the Aswan Dam threatened to flood the complex.
The lander Philae bounced several times when its harpoons failed to fire, and instead of Agilkia, settled in a dark crevice in a different location, later named ABYDOS after an ancient Egyptian city.
DEIR EL-MEDINA
A “pit” on the comet surface near the spot where Rosetta is to make a “controlled impact” on Friday.
According to the European Space Agency, the feature resembles a pit in an Egyptian town that was home to workers building pharaonic tombs in the Valley of the Kings. It became a dumping ground for discarded pottery with inscriptions recording aspects of daily life.
Just as the clay shards yielded insight into working class ancient Egyptians, so scientists hope that peering deep into Deir el-Medina as Rosetta descends will reveal the insides of a comet.
HAPI
The “neck” that divides the two lobes of the plastic bath duck-shaped comet into a distinct “head” and larger “body”.
“Hapi is the Nile god, and we figured that he should separate the lobes in the same way that the Nile splits Egypt into the eastern and western side,” explains the European Space Agency’s Rosetta blog.
IMHOTEP
A region on the larger comet lobes, Imhotep shares the name of a master architect and pyramid-builder who lived about 5,000 years ago and was deified after his death.
The other 18 comet regions are also named after Egyptian deities, including Aten, Aker, Ash (god of oases), Babi (god of virility), and Seth (god of the desert).
“We wanted to adhere to the ancient Egyptian theme of the mission,” the ESA blog states. “Luckily, ancient Egyptians had so many deities in their long history that made this an easy decision.
“Moreover, many of the names were catchy, easy to remember — and more importantly, easy to pronounce.”
OSIRIS
An acronym for Optical, Spectroscopic and Infrared Remote Imaging System, the camera onboard Rosetta, Osiris was also the name of the ancient Egyptian god of the underworld.
PHILAE
The washing machine-sized comet lander got its name from the Nile island in southern Egypt where in 1815 an obelisk was found which was key to understanding the Rosetta stone, discovered in 1799, with carved inscriptions in hieroglyphs and Greek.
PTOLEMY
A gas “sniffer” onboard the Philae lander shares a name with an Egyptian king whose name appeared on the Rosetta stone.
The comet itself is named after the two Ukrainian astronomers, Klim Churyumov and Svetlana Gerasimenko, credited with discovering it in 1969. “P” refers to a periodic comet, which takes fewer than 200 years to orbit the Sun, while “67” is its number on a list of similar comets discovered.
