"Alice is not an acronym; it is simply a pretty name."

Dr. S. Alan Stern, SwRI

Alice is a compact, general-purpose UV imaging telescope/spectrometer, which is now flying aboard the ESA/NASA Rosetta asteroid flyby/comet rendezvous mission. There are four Alice type instruments currently flying. In addition to the one on Rosetta (R-Alice), there is a Persi Alice on New Horizons; the LAMP (an instrument on Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO); and finally, the UVS instrument onboard the Juno spacecraft to Jupiter.

A "spectrometer" is an instrument that separates light into its constituent wavelengths, like a prism, only better. An "imaging spectrometer" both separates the different wavelengths of light and produces an image of the target at each wavelength. The R-Alice experiment is aimed primarily at studying the gases released from the nucleus of comet 67 P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in order to help understand the origin of our solar system.