The workforce of scientists and engineers behind NASA’s Curiosity rover has named a hill alongside the rover’s path on Mars in honour of lately deceased mission scientist Rafael Navarro-Gonzalez.
A craggy hump that stretches 120 meters tall, ‘Rafael Navarro Mountain’ is positioned on Mount Sharp in northwest Gale Crater, NASA stated on Monday.
Navarro-Gonzalez died on January 28 from problems associated to Covid-19.
A number one astrobiologist in Mexico, he was a co-investigator on the Pattern Evaluation at Mars (SAM), a transportable chemistry lab aboard Curiosity that has been sniffing out the chemical make-up of Martian soil, rocks, and air.
As such, he helped lead the workforce that recognized historic natural compounds on Mars; his many accomplishments additionally included figuring out the function of volcanic lightning within the origin of life on Earth.
Navarro-Gonzalez was a researcher at Nuclear Sciences Institute on the Nationwide Autonomous College of Mexico in Mexico Metropolis.
“We’re actually honoured to have a outstanding hill named after our dad; it’s his and our dream come true to see this occur,” wrote Navarro-Gonzalez’s youngsters, Rafael and Karina Navarro Aceves, in a press release to NASA.
Rafael Navarro Mountain sits at a serious geological transition in Gale Crater from a clay-rich area to 1 that’s wealthy in sulfate minerals.
Analysing sulfate minerals could assist scientists higher perceive the most important shift within the Martian local weather from wetter to drier circumstances, in keeping with Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity’s undertaking scientist based mostly at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
(With inputs from companies)
