Space: NASA honors Algerian natural parks on Mars

Portions of Mars were named after natural parks in Algeria at the instigation of Algerian physicist Nourredine Melikechi, member of the Martian mission of the American agency NASA, who explained to AFP that he wanted to draw attention to the fragility of the Earth.

Three Martian sites are now listed with the names of the national parks of Tassili n’Ajjer, Ghoufi and Djurdjura, specifies Nourredine Melikechi, also proud to pay homage to his native country.

“Our planet is fragile and this is a signal to the world to take care of our national parks, whether they are in Algeria or elsewhere,” explains Nourredine Melikechi, interviewed in the United States by AFP-TV.

An arid high plateau in the Sahara

For the scientist, the attribution of Algerian names to certain Martian sites is justified in particular by their strong resemblance.

“The first that came to my mind was Tassili n’Ajjer,” says Nourredine Melikechi, who left Algeria in 1990 for the United States where he teaches at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

The Tassili is a high arid plateau of the Sahara, characterized by rock formations overlooking sand dunes, classified by UNESCO for the presence of prehistoric paintings dating back at least 12,000 years.

“It reminds me of Mars”

“Every time I see photos of Mars, it reminds me of Tassili, and now when I see Tassili, it reminds me of Mars,” underlines the physicist.

Several paintings show one-eyed, horned giants, which the French archaeologist Henri Lhote had described as “great Martian deities”, in a book published in 1958 (“In Search of the Tassili Frescoes”).

“These paintings are a signature, a book that tells how people lived in the past. We see animals there, but also people who seem to arrive from elsewhere,” says the scientist.

“The feeling that life can be hard”

They were drawn, according to certain sources, after consumption of psychotropic substances by prehistoric populations. The Ghoufi canyon, an ancient inhabited site at the foot of the imposing Aurès massif in eastern Algeria, was Nourredine Melikechi’s second choice.

According to him, the dwellings dug into the cliff, also listed as UNESCO World Heritage, bear witness to human resilience. “Ghoufi gives you the feeling that life can be hard, but that you can get through it in the end: these rocks have survived, the vegetation has survived and so have humans,” explains Nourredine Melikechi.

“If you look at Ghoufi’s images, they look like certain areas of Mars and highlight the passage of time and how the planets change,” he also notes.

“The wealth of natural habitats”

The third park, Djurdjura, a snow-capped mountain range located 140 km east of Algiers, looks much less like Mars than Tassili or Ghoufi but Nourredine Melikechi proposed it to evoke “the richness of natural habitats” .

According to the physicist, the naming process was launched after the landing in 2021 of the Perseverance rover in an unexplored part of Mars.

The area was divided into “quadrants” to be named before studying them. “We were asked for names, I suggested these three national parks, while others suggested parks from around the world.” A team then reviewed and selected the final names.

A “global and historical recognition”

The announcement concerning the Algerian sites, made by NASA at the beginning of the month, delighted local media and authorities. The Minister of Culture, Zouhir Ballalou, welcomed “global and historical recognition” of Algeria’s “natural and cultural” riches.

In recent years, the Algerian government has made efforts to promote tourism, particularly in the Sahara, through the issuance of visas on arrival.

Around 2.5 million tourists visited Algeria last year, a record number for the last 20 years. Nourredine Melikechi hopes that the new names will attract more visitors to her country of origin. “These places are treasures that we humans have inherited. They absolutely must be preserved.”

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