Philae(spacececraft)

Philae   is a robotic European Space Agency lander that accompanied the Rosetta spacecraft  until its designated landing on Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko (67P), more than ten years after departing Earth. ^] On 12 November 2014, the lander achieved the first-ever controlled touchdown on a comet nucleus.  Its instruments are expected to obtain the first images from a comet's surface and make the first in situ analysis to determine its composition. Philae is tracked and operated from the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) at Darmstadt, Germany. 
The lander is named after Philae Island in the Nile, where an obelisk was found and used, along with the Rosetta Stone, to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics.Philae '​s mission is to land successfully on the surface of a comet, attach itself, and transmit data from the surface about the comet's composition. Unlike the Deep Impact probe, which by design struck comet Tempel 1's nucleus on 4 July 2005, Philae is not an impactor. Some of the instruments and the lander were used for the first time as autonomous systems during the Mars flyby on 25 February 2009. ÇIVA, the camera system, returned some images while the Rosetta instruments were powered down; ROMAP took measurements of the Martian magnetosphere. Most of the other instruments need contact with the surface for analysis and stayed offline during the flyby. An optimistic estimate of mission length is "four to five months".