The team operating NASA’s Perseverance rover has begun cataloging geological formations on the surface of Mars with Navajo names.
The name is a sign of the project’s large contingent at national universities and laboratories in New Mexico and Arizona, states that include traditional Navajo lands, Forbes reported.
Perseverance, nicknamed Perky, landed on Mars on February 18 after a journey of 239 million miles.
The rover’s first scientific focus is on a stone called “Máaz” – the Navajo word for “Mars”.
An image of the rover’s first scientific outbreak, a stone called “Máaz” – the Navajo word for “Mars”
Navajo Vice President Myron Lizer (left) and President Jonathan Nez (right)
Surface missions are nicknamed landmarks to give members of the mission team, numbering in the thousands, a common way of referring to rocks, soils, and other geological features.
Prior to launch, the Perseverance team identified a network of quadrilaterals of approximately 1.5 square kilometers (1 square mile) each. The team named the quads after the parks and national conservations on Earth with a similar geology, persevering in the quad named after the Canyon de Chelly National Monument in Arizona.
Aaron Yazzie of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, an engineer of the Navajo team, is requesting the permission and collaboration of the Navajo Nation to name the work.
Some terms were inspired by the ground Perseverance captured in images at the landing site, such as “tséwózí bee hazhmeezh” or “rows of pebbles rolling like waves.” Yazzie added suggestions, including “bidziil” or “strength” and “hoł nilį́” or “respect.” Perseverance has been translated into “Ha’ahóni.”
Navajo President Jonathan Nez and Vice President Myron Lizer provided a list of Navajo 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 officials and Perseverance continues to explore.
“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 to understand the importance and significance of learning our language,” Nez added. “Our words were used to help win World War II, and now we help ourselves navigate and learn more about the planet Mars.”
Perseverance must be “learned” in language to recognize landmarks labeled in Navajo. The accent marks used in the English alphabet to convey the language’s intonation cannot be read by the rover’s computer.
While the team tried to find translations that most closely resembled Navajo spellings, Yazzie said he intended to use English letters without special characters or punctuation to represent Navajo words.
The project’s scientists embraced the opportunity to learn Navajo words and their meaning, said Katie Stack Morgan, deputy scientist for the Perseverance project.
“This partnership encourages the rover’s scientific team to pay more attention to the names considered for the characteristics of Mars – which means both geologically and for people on Earth,” said Stack Morgan.
A key goal for the mission of Perseverance is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the geology of Mars and the climate of the past, becoming the first mission to collect and hide the rock and Martian soil and pave the way for human exploration.
The latest recording shared by NASA is Perseverance launching its laser for the first time on Mars (conceptual drawing)
The rover is tied to a series of high-tech tools to help him discover the secrets of the crater.
A SuperCam triggers laser beams that heat targets to 9,982 degrees Celsius (18,000 Fahrenheit), which is hot enough to turn solid rock into plasma that can be represented by a camera for further 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 the signs of ancient life in Jezero Crater, a former lake that flowed with 3.5 billion water. years ago.
Attached to the mast is a 12-kilogram sensor designed to perform five types of analysis to help scientists determine which rocks the rover should test.
The latest audio recording shared by NASA was from the first laser shot of Perseverance. The sounds of 30 impacts can be heard during recording recorded by an attached microphone.
The clip shared by NASA, which is about 10 seconds, includes the first recorded sounds from the Martian world.
The laser allowed the ground team to analyze the composition of the target, which turned out 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 relative hardness or the presence of weather coverage.”
Perseverance chose the target Máaz, which is Navajo for “Mars”, which was located 10 meters away from its location. NASA intercepted the pulses for further analysis that the rocks were largely volcanic
Combining two images, this mosaic shows a close-up view of the rock target called “Yeehgo” from the SuperCam instrument on NASA’s Perseverance rover on Mars. The component images were taken by Remote Micro-Imager (RMI) from SuperCam. 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 ground. Perseverance is now heading for the crater that was a former lake that flowed with water 3.5 billion years ago.
“These recordings have shown that our microphone not only works well, but we also have a high-quality signal for our scientific studies,” said Naomi Murdoch, a member of the SuperCam team, a researcher at the Institute of Aeronautics and Espace in Toulouse , France said on Wednesday.
It is unclear if the area was once volcanic, said SuperCam lead researcher Roger Wiens of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, a US energy department in New Mexico.
Máaz could be “a sedimentary rock composed of magmatic grains that have been washed downstream into Lake Jezero and cemented together,” Wiens said.
Perseverance is one of NASA’s two rovers currently operating on the red planet. Curiosity has been circulating along Gale Crater since August 2012.
The sounds of 30 impacts can be heard during audio recording, which were filmed from the rover’s SuperCam instrument and picked up by a microphone attached to the rover.