The team at NASA’s Perseverance rover has begun cataloging geologic formations on the surface of Mars with names from the Navajo language.
The names are a nod to the project’s large contingent of universities and national laboratories in New Mexico and Arizona, states that traditionally comprise Navajo land, Forbes reported.
Perseverance, nicknamed Perky, landed on Mars on Feb. 18 after traveling 239 million miles.
The rover’s first scientific focus is a rock called ‘Máaz’ – the Navajo word for ‘Mars’.
An image of the rover’s first scientific focus, a rock called ‘Máaz’ – the Navajo word for ‘Mars’
Navajo Nation Vice President Myron Lizer (left) and President Jonathan Nez (right)
Surface Missions assign nicknames to landmarks to provide mission team members, which number in the thousands, a common way of referring to rocks, soils, and other geological features.
Before launch, Perseverance’s team identified a grid of quadrilaterals approximately 1.5 square kilometers (1 square mile) each. The team named the quads after national parks and reserves on Earth of similar geology, with persistence on the quad that’s named after Arizona’s Canyon de Chelly National Monument.
Aaron Yazzie of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, a team engineer who is Navajo, needed the Navajo Nation’s permission and cooperation with the naming aspect of the work.
Some terms are inspired by the Perseverance terrain captured in images at the landing site, such as ‘tséwózí bee hazhmeezh’ or ‘rolling rows of pebbles, like waves’. Yazzie added suggestions including ‘bidziil’ or ‘strength’ and ‘hoł nilį’ or ‘respect’. Perseverance was translated to ‘Ha’ahóni.’
Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez and Vice President Myron Lizer provided a list of Navajo language words that could be used by the Perseverance team.
The list includes 50 names and is expected to grow as the rover team works with Navajo Nation officials and continues to explore persistence.
“The partnership that the Nez-Lizer administration has built with NASA will help revitalize our Navajo language,” Nez said.
“We hope that using our language in the Perseverance mission will inspire more of our young Navajo people to understand the importance and meaning of learning our language,” added Nez. “Our words have been used to help win World War II, and now we help navigate and learn more about the planet Mars.”
Perseverance must be ‘learned’ the language to recognize landmarks labeled in Navajo. The accent marks used in the English alphabet to convey the intonation of the language cannot be read by the rover’s computer.
While the team tried to find translations that best matched Navajo spelling, Yazzie said they planned to use English letters with no special characters or punctuation to represent Navajo words.
Project scientists embraced the opportunity to learn Navajo words and their meanings, said Perseverance Deputy Project Scientist Katie Stack Morgan.
“This collaboration encourages the rover’s science team to think more about the names being considered for objects on Mars – what they mean both geologically and to humans on Earth,” said Stack Morgan.
A major goal of Perseverance’s mission is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the geology and climate of Mars’ past and become the first mission to collect and store Mars rock and Earth and pave the way for human exploration.
The latest image shared by NASA is Perseverance firing its laser for the first time on Mars (concept drawing)
The rover is tied up with a slew of high-tech tools to unlock the crater’s secrets.
A SuperCam fires laser beams that heat targets to 9,982 degrees Celsius (18,000 Fahrenheit), which is hot enough to convert the solid rock into plasma that can be imaged by a camera for further analysis.
The technology, located on the mast, releases pulses capable of vaporizing rocks up to 20 feet away and is an important part for examining signs of ancient life in the Jezero crater, a former lake that is 3, 5 billion years with water flowed. ago.
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 sample.
The latest audio recording shared by NASA was from Perseverance’s first laser shot. The sounds of 30 shocks can be heard during the recording, captured by a connected microphone.
The clip shared by NASA, which lasts about 10 seconds, features the first sounds recorded from the world of Mars.
The laser enabled the ground team to analyze the composition of the target, which turned out to be mostly volcanic rock.
NASA says that “variations in the intensity of the zapping sounds will provide information about the physical structure of the targets, such as the relative harshness or the presence of weathering layers.”
Perseverance chose the target Máaz, which is Navajo for ‘Mars’, which was 3 meters away from its location. NASA intercepted the pulses for further analysis that showed the rocks were largely volcanic
Combining two images, this mosaic shows a close-up of the rock target called ‘Yeehgo’ from the SuperCam instrument on NASA’s Perseverance rover on Mars. The images of the components were taken with SuperCam’s Remote Micro-Imager (RMI). To be compatible with the rover’s software, ‘Yeehgo’ is an alternate spelling of ‘Yéigo’, the Navajo word for diligent
The image depicts the delta at the Jezero Crater, an elevated area of dark brown rock in the center of the ground. Perseverance is now making its way into the crater that was a former lake that flowed with water 3.5 billion years ago
‘These recordings have shown that our microphone is not only functioning well, but we also have a very high quality signal for our scientific studies,’ said SuperCam team member Naomi Murdoch, a researcher at the Institut Supérieur de l’Aéronautique et de l Espace in Toulouse, France Wednesday.
It’s not yet clear whether the area was ever volcanic, said SuperCam lead researcher Roger Wiens of Los Alamos National Laboratory, a U.S. Department of Energy facility in New Mexico.
Máaz could be “a sedimentary rock composed of igneous grains washed downstream in Lake Jezero and cemented together,” Wiens said.
Perseverance is one of two NASA rovers currently operating on the Red Planet. Curiosity has been pervading Gale Crater since August 2012.
The sounds of 30 shocks can be heard during the audio recording, which were recorded with the rover’s SuperCam instrument and picked up by a microphone attached to the rover.