What’s the betting that Agilkia makes it into the baby name charts in 2015? This romantic, lyrical word is the name of an island in the Egyptian Nile, but it’s also just been given to the patch of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko where the Rosetta mission’s Philae lander is due to touch down.
More than 8,000 people from 135 different countries entered the ESA’s competition to name the landing site. More than 150 of these entrants independently suggested Agilkia. Surprised? You shouldn’t be, because this geographical reference fits beautifully with the overarching Egyptian imagery of the Rosetta mission.
It’s well known that the Rosetta spacecraft was named after the famous Rosetta stone, whose discovery in 1799 enabled historians to unlock the secrets of hieroglyphics. The choice of that name reflected the spacecraft’s role in deciphering the mysteries of the universe, while poetically linking space with time, language with science, archaeology with cosmology.
The connections continue. The Philae lander was christened in 2004 by an Italian high-school student, who made the connection between the lander and an ancient obelisk found on the island of Philae near Aswan. The obelisk was inscribed in both Greek and Egyptian characters and its discovery represented another landmark in the translation of hieroglyphics and the understanding of distant kingdoms.
Other ancient Egyptian references in the space mission include Ptolemy (after Ptolemy V, whose name appears on both the Rosetta stone and the Philae obelisk), and the on-board camera OSIRIS – an acronym for Optical, Spectroscopic, and InfraRed Remote Imaging System but also one of the most intriguing ancient Egyptian deities.
And now we have Agilkia – that enigmatic landscape which silently awaits the arrival of Philae.
