Philae (/ˈfaɪliː/ or /ˈfiːleɪ/) is a robotic European Space Agency lander that accompanied the Rosetta spacecraft until it landed on comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, more than ten years after departing Earth. On 12 November 2014, the probe achieved the first-ever soft landing on a comet nucleus. Its instruments obtained the first images from a comet's surface.Philae is monitored and operated from DLR's Lander Control Center in Cologne, Germany. Several of the instruments on Philae made the first direct analysis of a comet, sending back data that will be analysed to determine the composition of the surface.
The lander is named after the Philae obelisk, which bears a bilingual inscription and was used along with the Rosetta Stone to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs.
On 15 November 2014, Philae entered safe mode, or hibernation, after its batteries ran down due to reduced sunlight and an off-nominal spacecraft orientation at its unplanned landing site. Mission controllers hoped that additional sunlight on the solar panels by August 2015 might be sufficient to reboot the lander.Philae communicated sporadically with Rosetta from 13 June to 9 July 2015.
Philae /ˈfaɪli/ (Greek: Φιλαί Philai; Ancient Egyptian: Pilak, P'aaleq; Arabic: فيله Egyptian Arabic: [fiːlæ]) is currently an island in the reservoir of the Aswan Low Dam, downstream of the Aswan Dam and Lake Nasser, Egypt. Philae was originally located near the expansive First Cataract of the Nile River in southern Egypt, and was the site of an Ancient Egyptian temple complex. These rapids and the surrounding area have been variously flooded since the initial construction of the Old Aswan Dam in 1902. The temple complex was later dismantled and relocated to nearby Agilkia Island as part of the UNESCO Nubia Campaign project, protecting this and other complexes before the 1970 completion of the Aswan High Dam.
Philae is mentioned by numerous ancient writers, including Strabo,Diodorus,Ptolemy,Seneca,Pliny the Elder. It was, as the plural name indicates, the appellation of two small islands situated in latitude 24° north, just above the First Cataract near Aswan (Ancient Egyptian: Swenet, "Trade;" Ancient Greek: Συήνη - Syene). Groskurd computes the distance between these islands and Aswan at about 100 km (62 mi).