Language of Mars team sounds out of this world
Source: Agencies |
August 4, 2012, Saturday
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FASCINATED by NASA's latest Mars mission and planning to tune in?
Well, good luck understanding the space agency's everyday lingo, which resembles a sort of Martian alphabet soup.
In the highly specialized world of spacecraft engineering, there are many moving parts and pieces - not to mention processes. Names and descriptions are often reduced to acronyms and abbreviations, which are faster to string together in a sentence but can end up sounding downright alien.
So if you want to know if MSL will nail the EDL and what it can do on different sols, you have to learn the language.
Even speakers admit the jargon is sometimes jarring.
"It's kind of our own slang," explained Michael Watkins, mission manager of NASA's US$2.5 billion Mars project set to land on Sunday night. "It's a shorthand way to talk about these very complicated systems."
He added: "Even folks from other missions have no idea what we're talking about."
Let's start with the rover's name. In the halls of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, it's called MSL - short for Mars Science Laboratory. Spacecraft typically have technical names before being rechristened by the public through naming contests sponsored by NASA.
For example: the twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity that landed in 2004 were known as MER-A and MER-B for the longest time (MER is shorthand for Mars Exploration Rover.)
MSL did not become Curiosity until 2009 when a sixth-grader from Kansas proposed the nickname. Still, there are some hard-cores who continue to use the scientific moniker.
Curiosity is loaded with sophisticated instruments to study Mars' environment - with convoluted names to match. "Mastcam" refers to the pair of 2-megapixel color cameras on the rover's "head." "SAM" - short for Sample Analysis at Mars - is a mobile chemistry lab to sniff for carbon.
The dizzying naming system even extends to time. It takes Earth 24 hours to spin on its axis - the definition of a day. Mars spins more slowly than Earth - taking 24 hours and 39 minutes. To distinguish between Earth and Mars time, a Martian day is called a sol, Latin for "sun." Yesterday on Mars is yestersol.
"It takes some time to pick it up," said Ken Farley, a professor at the California Institute of Technology.
Well, good luck understanding the space agency's everyday lingo, which resembles a sort of Martian alphabet soup.
In the highly specialized world of spacecraft engineering, there are many moving parts and pieces - not to mention processes. Names and descriptions are often reduced to acronyms and abbreviations, which are faster to string together in a sentence but can end up sounding downright alien.
So if you want to know if MSL will nail the EDL and what it can do on different sols, you have to learn the language.
Even speakers admit the jargon is sometimes jarring.
"It's kind of our own slang," explained Michael Watkins, mission manager of NASA's US$2.5 billion Mars project set to land on Sunday night. "It's a shorthand way to talk about these very complicated systems."
He added: "Even folks from other missions have no idea what we're talking about."
Let's start with the rover's name. In the halls of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, it's called MSL - short for Mars Science Laboratory. Spacecraft typically have technical names before being rechristened by the public through naming contests sponsored by NASA.
For example: the twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity that landed in 2004 were known as MER-A and MER-B for the longest time (MER is shorthand for Mars Exploration Rover.)
MSL did not become Curiosity until 2009 when a sixth-grader from Kansas proposed the nickname. Still, there are some hard-cores who continue to use the scientific moniker.
Curiosity is loaded with sophisticated instruments to study Mars' environment - with convoluted names to match. "Mastcam" refers to the pair of 2-megapixel color cameras on the rover's "head." "SAM" - short for Sample Analysis at Mars - is a mobile chemistry lab to sniff for carbon.
The dizzying naming system even extends to time. It takes Earth 24 hours to spin on its axis - the definition of a day. Mars spins more slowly than Earth - taking 24 hours and 39 minutes. To distinguish between Earth and Mars time, a Martian day is called a sol, Latin for "sun." Yesterday on Mars is yestersol.
"It takes some time to pick it up," said Ken Farley, a professor at the California Institute of Technology.
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