During the year, he was searched for more than 243 thousand times
LONDON, November 17th. /tass/. The Cambridge English Dictionary named "perseverance" the word of 2021 in honor of the Mars rover of the same name, which, as part of the mission of the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), was taken to the Jezero crater on Mars to search for life on the Red Planet.
"The definition of the word perseverance was actively searched in the Cambridge Dictionary throughout 2021 - more than 243 thousand . times as of now. The peak of search queries occurred in the week from February 18 to 24 after [the rover] Perseverance landed on Mars," the Cambridge Dictionary said in a statement released on Wednesday. In 2020, the word "quarantine" was named the word of the year.
The Perseverance rover landed in the area of the Jezero crater on February 19. All operations during it were carried out in automatic mode. NASA experts expect to use Perseverance to detect traces of life on Mars in the distant past.
The Atlas V launch vehicle (Atlas-5) with a rover launched in July 2020 from the Cape Canaveral Cosmodrome (Florida). Perseverance should place rock and soil samples in about 40 special containers. It is planned that another rover will take most of them in 2026. It is expected that the containers will be loaded onto a special launcher that will take them into Mars orbit. Next, the samples will be picked up by the next device, which should deliver them to Earth. NASA expects this to happen in the 2030s.
Earlier, the Oxford English Dictionary called the concept of "vax" (vax), an abbreviated version of the verb, noun and adjective associated with vaccination, the main word of 2021. Examples of the use of this word include expressions such as vax sites ("places for vaccination") or fully vaxxed ("fully vaccinated").
