As I’m writing this, I’m basically засыпаю на ходу (falling asleep; lit: falling asleep while walking) so, прошу прощения за возможные опечатки (pardon me for possible typos). I stayed up very late last night (ok, now that you’re reading it, it was 2 night ago) watching… не Олимпийские игры (not the Olympic Games), but the landing of Curiosity on Mars.

Have you seen it? Wasn’t the whole thing simply потрясающий (mind-blowing)? Or as one Russian news outlet put it, it was a чумовая (crazy, off-the-hook) landing.

I feel that Curiosity’s landing was as seminal as the launch of первый искуственный спутник (the first artificial satellite aka the Sputnik). Back then the Russian word спутник, which means “fellow traveler”, firmly established itself in the English language.

Most Russian online news portals use the English “Curiosity” although some transliterate it into Cyrillic as “Кьюриосити” instead of translating it literally as любопытство. Martian rover is sometimes translated as ровер, but марсоход seems to be more common. Марсоход is a compound word formed by adding the noun ход (here: motion) to the planet’s name, Марс (Mars). Now that you know this, you will have no problem translating луноход and венероход which are both examples of планетоход. Heck, you might even have a вездеход in your garage (ok, a hint here: везде means “everywhere”) although it’s not nearly as cool as Curiosity.

But I digress… Let’s talk about Curiosity’s big and early accomplishment and the reason I stayed up so late. So, Curiosity landed. How to say “to land” in Russian? It depends on where exactly you land and how formal you want to sound:

If you are on an airplane, you would say Мой самолёт приземлился в Шереметьево (My plane landed in Sheremetyevo). Or, После ста восьми минут полёта, Гагарин приземлился в поле (After 108 minutes of flight, Gagarin landed in a field).

However, since the word земля means not just “land”, but also “Earth”, you cannot say that a moon landing is приземление на Луну (not if you want to be all technical anyway). So what did Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin do back in 1969? Они прилунились (They landed on the Moon). Прилуниться is a good, but rarely used, word to know. However, the format of при- + name of the planet + -ться doesn’t hold when we try to apply it to other events. While words such as привенериться, примарситься and припланетиться sound like fun, they are not real words.

Instead, if we are striving for technical accuracy, we will use the verb садиться (to land) or a phrase произвести посадку (to land) as in

Самолёт рейса Нью-Йорк-Москва произвёл экстренную посадку в Таганроге (Flight New York-Moscow made an emergency landing in Taganrog) or

Марсоход “Curiosity” произвёл посадку на поверхности Красной планеты (Mars rover Curiosity landed on the surface of the Red planet).

But приземлиться remains a layman’s term for the process. You can still say Кьюриосити приземлился на Марсе (Curiosity landed on Mars).

As you probably know, one of Curiosity’s most interesting tasks is to look for следы жизни (traces of life) on Mars. The big so-far unanswered question is есть ли жизнь на Марсе (is there life on Mars) or была ли жизнь на Марсе (was there life on Mars).

The news articles, including this инфографика (infographics) about Curiosity have lots of very useful vocabulary. A must-know phrases are кратер Гейла (the Gale crater) and нейтронный спектрометр (neutron spectrometer) since it describes a vital piece of equipment and Russian contribution to the project (it’s actually used to detect presence of water). Other good words to know include

безумный – crazy
сложный – complex
невероятно сложный – incredibly complex
задержка – delay
испытание – challenge
трудность – difficulty
успех – success
точно выбранное время – just the right time
точно выбранное место – just the right place
мягкая посадка – soft landing or “landing” since жёсткая посадка would mean “a crash landing”
радикальный – radical
предшественник – predecessor
возлагать надежды на… – anchor one’s hopes upon…
главная цель – main goal
крупный проект – a large project

And now you are ready to watch видео-ролик (video) “7 минут ужаса” (7 minutes of terror) with Russian subtitles. And I’m ready to get some sleep… right after I check NASA website for more latest новости и фотографии (news and photos).