Sunday, April 3 2005 16:25 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

Kolkata: Indian languages Hindi and Bengali find a respectable mention alongside 24 others from across the world on a sundial aboard NASA's Mars Surveyor that landed on the red planet in January 2004.

The first sundial ever on a planet other than earth, the three-inch square structure in black and gold, has 'mangal', meaning mars, written on its face in both these languages.

The sundial, primarily being used as a calibration target (a test pattern to adjust the brightness and tint of pictures taken by the rover's cameras) would also be a monument for future Martian explorers and possible inhabitants, Dr Amitabha Ghosh of NASA's Mars Pathfinder Mission said.

"Two Indian languages have been given pride of place in the engravings on the sundial, as has been Braille. These languages were chosen from among those used by more than three quarters of the Earth's population," Ghosh, who arrived in Kolkata, to attend the convocation of a private institute, said.

'Mars' is written in Arabic, Chinese, Danish, English, French, German, Greek, Hawaiian, Hebrew, Inuktituk, Japanese, Korean, Lingala, Malay-Indonesian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Thai besides Sumerian and Mayan, the cultures in which the planet figured prominently.

Ghosh said that the pictures of the sundial taken by the lander's panoramic camera after its return to earth in January 2006 would reveal the passage of the hours and seasons, as the sun moves across the Martian sky.

"One Martian year is equivalent of two earth years and we are thrilled to track the seasons on Mars. Currently it is a dusty season there," he said.