It's all Martian to them

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Mars as photographed by the Hubble telescope. (NASA)

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PASADENA, Calif. -- 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 $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 the most sophisticated instruments to study Mars' environment -- with convoluted names to match. "Mastcam" refers to the pair of 2-megapixel colour cameras on the rover's "head." "SAM" -- short for Sample Analysis at Mars -- is the mobile chemistry lab designed to sniff for carbon compounds. "ChemCam" stands for Chemistry and Camera, otherwise known as the rock-zapping laser. And "RAD"? That's the radiation detector.

Before Curiosity can start science experiments, it must first survive an intense EDL -- entry, descent and landing -- or as NASA has come to call it: Seven minutes of terror.

Signals are received through the DSN, or Deep Space Network, a worldwide network of antenna dishes that communicates with interplanetary spacecraft. Nominal means A-OK. Not so for anomaly (translation: Houston, we have a problem.)

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.

-- The Associated Press

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition August 4, 2012 A25