CAIRO, September 15 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Archeologists this week will send a robot equipped with a mini-camera into Cheops, Egypt's largest pyramid, to probe a mystery behind a stone door, Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities said Sunday, September 15, 2002.

The robot will, overnight Monday, September 16, crawl through a shaft of several dozen meters (yards) to a stone door where it will pierce a tiny hole and introduce a fiber-optic camera, the council's secretary general Zahi Hawas said.

The mission of the robot, about the size of a large electric toy train, will be filmed by the U.S. network National Geographic television, which is financing the experiment, he said.

Two amateur archeologists, whose previous work has been praised by the Egyptian authorities, have for months tried unsuccessfully to obtain permission from Hawas to conduct similar research inside Cheops, Agence France-Presse (AFP) said.

Frenchmen Gilles Dormion and Jean-Yves Verd'hurt were also hoping to conduct a probe of a previously unknown shaft in a different part of the pyramid.

No-one knows where the various shafts may lead. The burial chamber of Cheops, a pharaoh who reigned before 25OO BC, has never been found.

Also overnight Monday, the National Geographic network will broadcast the opening by Hawas of a sarcophagus which was found in June near the Giza pyramids outside Cairo.

An Egyptian team found the tomb of the chief supervisor of the area where the pyramid builders lived, Hawas said at the time.

He said the tomb, found two kilometers (one mile) south of the Sphinx, was made up of a room with five vaults, one of them containing an intact limestone sarcophagus with a mummy inside.

"This sarcophagus could be one of the oldest intact sarcophagi ever found," said Hawas.