MOSCOW, March 6. /TASS/. The official wheeled off-road vehicle of the Clean Arctic - Vostok-77 expedition, tested in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Region, may be named after one of the Far North's indigenous peoples who were among first Arctic explorers. The new line of vehicles could be named Chukchi or Sami, leader of the expedition's off-road vehicles' testing group Tatyana Zikunkova told TASS.

"The idea is to give to the new off-road vehicles the name of the Far North's people. Quite possibly, they will proudly have the name "Sami", "Chukchi" or of another culture that in the past successfully explored the Arctic, and we now are learning from them how to live comfortably in the tundra and taiga," she said.

The new line of off-road vehicles for the North, Siberia and the Far East is developed on the basis of UAZ off-road vehicles. The new vehicles will be used to cover long distances (1,000 - 2,000 km) in extreme frosts - at minus 40-50 degrees. "It's been a long-lasting dream of drivers in the North and Far East - a modern interior on the durable UAZ base. In this expedition, we are testing units, heating and cabin insulation systems for wheeled off-road vehicles of the near future," the expedition's chief pilot Vladimir Dmitriev told TASS.

"An important feature of the vehicles we are testing in the expedition is the new life-support system for the crew and passengers. A progressive interior insulation system, duplicated heating and ventilation systems, a fundamentally new hardtop structure," Leonid Stern, president of the International Shukhov Foundation, supporting Russian engineering developments, told TASS.

Along with the wheeled off-road vehicles, the Clean Arctic - Vostok-77 expedition is testing Arhant-N amphibious snowmobiles, which have crossed rivers, lakes and swamps in the Murmansk and Karelia Regions. In the future, the snowmobiles will be involved in search and rescue operations and in medical care for people living in hard-to-reach settlements.

The Clean Arctic - Vostok-77 is the largest, in terms of the number of participants, continental high-latitude scientific expedition in the entire history of the North's research. The expedition will have 77 teams, and about 700 participants from more than 20 centers of the Russian Academy of Sciences and federal universities, as well as volunteers of the Russian Geographical Society, will participate in it over a year. They will conduct more than 200 studies on the routes that will be 12,000 kilometers long. One of the tasks will be to study and preserve rare northern languages. TASS is the expedition's general information partner.