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Message Subject Rosetta Comet Orbiter -** 120 Icy Patches ** Philae Phones Home ** Ceres Fly Over Video ** New Coma Discovery ** Picture MOTHER LODE !
Poster Handle Anonymous Coward
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So what's with all this ancient Egypt stuff ?

This week the Rosetta orbiter has climed to the second step on its pyramid orbit [link to blogs.esa.int] of the Sphinx comet [link to www.thedailybeast.com] , time for a rundown of ancient Egyptian links.

Rosetta refers to the Rosetta stone. This is a granite slab with an inscription in three ancient languages, found in the town of Rosetta ( Rashid ) in the Nile delta by Napoleon's army. The stone provided the key to reading the previously undecipherable Egyptian hieroglyphics. It was left to the brilliant French philologist, Jean-François Champollion, to decipher it and for the first time in centuries be able to understand hieroglyphics. Here is a short version of how he did it.



[link to www.youtube.com]

You can watch the longer version from 9 minutes in episode 12 of Carl Sagan's cosmos.

The intention of the Rosetta mission is to unlock the secrets of the early solar system by studying comet 67P, just as the Rosetta stone helped to unlock the secrets of ancient Egypt.

Rosetta ( orbiter ): Named after the town ( Rashid in Arabic ) where the Rosetta stone was found. [link to cdn.roughguides.com]

Philae
( lander ): The island in the Nile where an obelisk was discovered that had an inscription which helped to decipher the Rosetta stone. [link to en.wikipedia.org]

Ptolemy
( a Philae instrument ): The name of the first Helenistic king of Egypt and his dynasty. His name was one of the keys to deciphering the Rosetta stone.

Berenice
( a cancelled Rosetta instrument ): The wife of Ptolemy I ( Berenice and Ptolemy were to be identical instruments )

Now we get into acronyms. Scientists and engineers love mangling acronyms to make relevant words.

OSIRIS
( Optical, Spectroscopic, and Infrared Remote Imaging System ) Osiris was the Egyptian god of the underworld and the dead. The OSIRIS team have a neat logo they put on their software and documents, which apparently means the eye of god. [link to www.enterprisemission.com]

SESAME ( Surface Electrical, Seismic and Acoustic Monitoring Experiments) Sesame, pretty essential in Egyptian cooking.

MIDAS (Micro-Imaging Dust Analysis System) Midas was an ancient king of Phrygia, so not really then.

Here are a couple of pages listing the instrument names, if you find any other Egyptian links please post them here, thanks.

[link to en.wikipedia.org]

[link to en.wikipedia.org]


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