If you read about NASA's Perseverance rover, come across the name of its landing site on Mars — Jezero Crater — and pronounce it in your head, you may be doing it wrong. Many people at NASA aren't pronouncing it correctly, either.
NASA's Perseverance mission will attempt to land on Mars today (Feb. 18). Once it reaches the 28-mile-wide (45 kilometers) Jezero Crater, the rover will use its seven instruments and the help of a helicopter called Ingenuity to study Earth's neighboring planet like never before.
Sending this $2.7 billion science project to Mars required NASA to think a lot about where exactly to drop the mission. It took about five years for NASA to select a landing site, and on Nov. 19, 2018, NASA announced it would send Perseverance (then known simply as the Mars 2020 rover) to a dried-up lake bed called Jezero Crater.
Now, as Americans get ready for Perseverance to touch down in Jezero Crater today, it's time we all learn to pronounce the crater's name.
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"Jezero" is a slavic word meaning "lake." The Planetary Society, a non-profit advocating for space exploration, published an audio clip back in 2018 (which you can download as an M4A audio file) in which a person pronounces the name correctly. Pro-tip for English speakers: Think of the letter "J" as sounding more like the letter "Y."
"It is correctly pronounced something like 'YEH-zuh-doh,' though [Perseverance] mission team members typically pronounce it 'DZEH-zuh-row,'" wrote planetary geologist and science communicator Emily Lakdawalla in an article published by The Planetary Society. Two and half years later, mission team members are still pronouncing "Jezero" with a hard "J" (here is one example).
Video: How to pronounce 'Jezero' in Croatian
"Jezero" is in good company. There are many space names, such as "Ryugu," "Iapetus," "'Oumuamua" and "Sleipnir Fossa" that encourage astronomy enthusiasts to tap into the different languages around the world.
Space.com is providing live updates on the landing of NASA's Perseverance mission.
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