In 2000, a main belt asteroid was named 15614 Pillinger after Colin Pillinger. In 2003, he was appointed a CBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours List for his services to higher education and to science. Pillinger played a role in the "Philae" lander that was part of the "Rosetta" mission which successfully made its rendezvous with comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko in 2014. In particular he was an advocate of the idea of deploying the lander "Philae" to conduct scientific experiments in situ, and was instrumental in getting the Ptolemy device accepted as part of the science payload.