The team operating NASA’s Perseverance rover has begun cataloging geological formations on the surface of Mars with Navajo language names.
The names are a nod to the large contingent of the project from the national universities and laboratories of New Mexico and Arizona, states that include traditional Navajo lands, Forbes reported.
Perseverance, nicknamed Perky, landed on Mars on February 18 after a 239 million-mile journey.
The rover’s first scientific focus is on a rock called “Máaz”, the Navajo word meaning “Mars”.
An image of the rover’s first scientific focus, a rock called “Máaz”, the Navajo word meaning “Mars”
Myron Lizer, Vice President of the Navajo Nation (left) and President Jonathan Nez (Right)
Surface missions assign nicknames to landmarks to provide mission team members, who number in the thousands, a common way of referring to rocks, soils, and other geological features.
Prior to the launch, the Perseverance team identified a grid of quadrangles of about 1.5 square kilometers (1 square mile) each. The team named the quads after Earth National Parks and Preserves with a similar geology, and perseverance played the quad with the name of Arizona’s Chelly Canyon National Monument.
Aaron Yazzie, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, a team engineer who is Navajo, obtained permission and collaboration from the Navajo nation with the name aspect of the work.
Some terms were inspired by the ground Perseverance captured in images at its landing site, such as “tséwózí bee hazhmeezh” or “rolls of pebbles, like waves.” Yazzie added suggestions such as “bidziil” or “strength” and “hoł nilį́” or “respect.” Perseverance translated into “Ha’ahóni.”
Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez and Vice President Myron Lizer provided a list of Navajo words that the Perseverance team could use.
The list includes 50 names and is expected to grow as the rover team works with Navajo nation officials and Perseverance continues to explore.
“The collaboration that the Nez-Lizer Administration has created with NASA will help revitalize our Navajo language,” Nez said.
“We hope that using our language on the Perseverance mission will inspire more than our young Navajos to understand the importance and importance of learning our language,” Nez added. “Our words were used to help win World War II and we are now helping to navigate and learn more about the planet Mars.”
Perseverance must be taught the language to recognize milestones labeled in Navajo. The rover’s computer cannot read the accent marks used in the English alphabet to convey the intonation of the language.
Although the team tried to find translations that looked more like Navajo spellings, Yazzie said he plans to use English letters without special characters or punctuation to represent Navajo words.
Project scientists welcomed the opportunity to learn Navajo words and their meaning, said Katie Stack Morgan, assistant scientist for the Perseverance project.
“This partnership is encouraging the rover’s scientific team to have more thought about the names that are considered for functions on Mars, which means both geologically and for people on Earth,” Stack Morgan said.
A key goal for Perseverance’s mission is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize Mars ’past geology and climate, becoming the first mission to collect and hide Martian rock and soil and pave the way for human exploration.
The last recording shared by NASA is Perseverance firing its laser for the first time on Mars (conceptual drawing)
The rover is tied up with a lot of high-tech instruments to help it discover the secrets of the crater.
A SuperCam shoots laser beams that heat targets at 9,982 degrees Celsius (18,000 Fahrenheit), which are hot enough to transform solid rock into plasma that the camera can imagine for later analysis.
The technology, located on the mast, releases pulses capable of vaporizing rocks up to 6 meters (20 feet) apart and is a key component in investigating signs of ancient life in Jezero Crater, an ancient lake that flowed with 3.5 billion water. of years. does.
Attached to the mast is a 12-pound sensor designed to perform five types of analysis to help scientists determine which rocks the rover should test.
The last audio recording shared by NASA was from Perseverance’s first laser shot. 30-impact sounds can be heard during recording captured by a connected microphone.
The clip shared by NASA, which lasts about 10 seconds, includes the first sounds recorded from the Martian world.
The laser allowed the ground team to analyze the composition of the target, which proved to be mostly volcanic rocks.
NASA says that “variations in the intensity of zapping sounds will provide information about the physical structure of targets, such as their relative hardness or the presence of weather coatings.”
Perseverance chose the target Máaz, which is Navajo for “Mars”, which was ten meters from its location. NASA intercepted the pulses for further analysis to determine that the rocks were mostly volcanic.
Combining two images, this mosaic shows a close-up view of the rock target called “Yeehgo” from NASA’s Perseverance rover’s SuperCam instrument on Mars. Component images were taken by SuperCam’s Remote Micro-Imager (RMI). To be compatible with rover software, “Yeehgo” is an alternative spelling of “Yéigo”, the Navajo word for diligent
The image is an image of the delta near Jezero Crater which is an elevated area of dark brown rock in the middle of the earth. Now perseverance paves the way for the crater that was an ancient lake that gushed from water 3.5 billion years ago
“These recordings have shown that our microphone not only works well, but we also have a very high quality signal for our scientific studies,” said Naomi Murdoch, a member of the SuperCam team, a researcher at the Higher Institute. of the Air Force and Espace in Toulouse, France, said Wednesday.
It’s still unclear if the area was volcanic, said Roger Wiens, principal investigator for SuperCam at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, a U.S. energy department in New Mexico.
Máaz could be “a sedimentary rock composed of large igneous rocks that were washed downstream into Lake Jezero and cemented together,” Wiens said.
Perseverance is one of two NASA rovers currently operating on the red planet. Curiosity has been traversing Gale Crater since August 2012.
Sounds of 30 impacts can be heard during audio recording, which were fired from the rover’s SuperCam instrument and captured by a microphone connected to the rover.