[70/365] Máaz

[cosmolinguist]

The first scientific focus of NASA’s Perseverance rover is a rock named “Máaz” – the Navajo word for “Mars.” The rover’s team, in collaboration with the Navajo Nation Office of the President and Vice President, has been naming features of scientific interest with words in the Navajo language.
...
Mission scientists worked with a Navajo (or Diné) engineer on the team, Aaron Yazzie of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, to seek the Navajo Nation’s permission and collaboration in naming new features on Mars.
...
one suggestion was “tséwózí bee hazhmeezh,” or “rolling rows of pebbles, like waves.” Yazzie added suggestions like “strength” (“bidziil”) and “respect” (“hoł nilį́”) to the list. Perseverance itself was translated to “Ha’ahóni.”

Here's the link.

From a linguistic perspective, I'm really curious how viable "naming stuff on another planet" is as a language revitalization plan or policy! And it's sad but unsurprising that Perseverance can't deal with the accented characters necessary to spell Diné words properly, a problem that befalls almost all the world's languages except the one the internet is written in (on that subject, here's an interesting article I read the other day about how that problem is playing out for Urdu script).