Team gets the go-ahead to use a Mars-inspired robot to try to unravel one of ancient Egypt's deepest secrets
A joint expedition to unravel one of the biggest mysteries of ancient Egypt, using technology developed in Hong Kong, has been approved by Cairo's guardian of the pharaohs' treasures.
Zahi Hawass, secretary-general of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), gave the go-ahead for Hong Kong inventor Ng Tze-chuen and the University of Singapore to build and operate a robotic rover that it is hoped will solve the puzzle of what lies behind the so-called 'second door' in a shaft of the Great Pyramid at Giza.
'We will contact the University of Singapore soon, and we are going to do it [the investigation] in October,' Dr Hawass told the Sunday Morning Post in an exclusive interview from his Cairo office.
The collaboration will take up where researchers from Boston's famed Massachusett's Institute of Technology, and National Geographic magazine, left off in 2002, in exploring the mysterious shafts at the heart of the Pharaoh Khufu's Great Pyramid.
Also called the Great Pyramid of Cheops ('Khufu' in Greek), it is the oldest of the seven ancient wonders of the world - and the only one still surviving.
Audiences around the world watched on live television in 2002 when a robot crawled 65 metres up a shaft in a room of the pyramid dubbed the 'Queen's Chamber'. When it reached a limestone door adorned by metallic handles, the Pyramid Rover drilled a hole and inserted a fibre-optic camera, to try to determine what was behind the door. But all it found was a second, rougher-hewn door.