Thanks to the incredible efforts of a new volunteer, HiRISE is now available in Portuguese.

Thiago Statella, a professor at the Instituto Federal de Educação, Ciência e Tecnologia de Mato Grosso in Brazil, has now helped to open up the world of Mars to the over 200 million speakers of Portuguese. He teaches remote sensing and digital image processing, and is working on his doctorate.

“The translation of HiRISE pages would call attention of more Brazilian researchers to Mars, especially students which are not so familiar to English,” Statella said. “When I say ‘students’ I don’t mean only undergraduate and graduate students but also high school students and even teachers would have a data source to improve their classes.”

Ari Espinoza, the HiTranslate Project coordinator, said, “Professor Statella’s contribution is an excellent start to reaching people speaking one of the world’s top languages. We hope to have other volunteers add more captions and help bring Mars to the Portuguese-speaking community across the globe.”

“I have been always interested in planetary sciences and it was great when I realized that I could use my knowledge as cartographer to study other planets,” continued Statella. “I had been doing research on mathematical morphology for a few years and then I decided to drive my attention to the processing of Mars images instead of only Earth images.”

As for the HiTranslate Project, Statella added, “Even those people not directly involved with science would have a source of information because, after all, space sciences (and even more specifically Mars) has always been a source of wonder.”

For more information about how to participate, contact the HiTranslate Project.

About HiRISE
The HiRISE camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is the most powerful one of its kind ever sent to another planet. Its high resolution allows us to see Mars like never before, and helps other missions choose a safe spot to land for future exploration.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Lockheed Martin Space Systems is the prime contractor for the project and built the spacecraft. The HiRISE camera was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. and is operated by the University of Arizona.