How and why NASA gives a name to every spot it studies on Mars

Martian maps are filled with monikers recognizing locations on Earth, explorers, and even cartoon characters.

NASA’s Perseverance rover is presently investigating rock outcrops alongside the rim of Mars’s Belva Crater. Some 2,300 miles (3,700 kilometers) away, NASA’s Curiosity rover lately drilled a pattern at a location referred to as “Ubajara.” The crater bears an official identify; the drill location is recognized by a nickname, therefore the citation marks.

Each names are amongst 1000’s utilized by NASA missions not simply to craters and hills, but additionally to each boulder, pebble, and rock floor they research.

“The No. 1 cause we choose all these names is to assist the workforce preserve observe of what they’re discovering every day,” mentioned Ashwin Vasavada, the Curiosity mission’s venture scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “In a while, we will confer with the various hills and rocks by identify as we talk about them and ultimately doc our discoveries.”

Simply how scientists give you the identifiers has advanced for the reason that early days, 25 years in the past, after they used cartoon character names. Here is a more in-depth look.

Official names

The distinction between an official identify on Mars and an unofficial one is seemingly easy: Official monikers have been permitted by a physique of scientists generally known as the Worldwide Astronomical Union (IAU). The IAU units requirements for naming planetary options and logs the names within the Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature.

For instance, craters bigger than 37 miles (60 kilometers) are named for well-known scientists or science-fiction authors; smaller craters are named after cities with populations of lower than 100,000 folks. Jezero Crater, which Perseverance has been exploring, shares the identify with a Bosnian city; Belva, an impression crater inside Jezero, is known as after a West Virginia city that’s, in flip, named after Belva Lockwood, the suffragist who ran for president in 1884 and 1888.

Greater than 2,000 areas on Mars bear official names, however much more unofficial nicknames dot the Martian map.

Evolving nicknames

Early Mars missions typically took a whimsical route with nicknames, even utilizing cartoon character names. “Yogi Rock,” “Casper,” and “Scooby-Doo” have been among the many unofficial names utilized by the workforce behind NASA’s first rover, Sojourner, within the late Nineteen Nineties.

The philosophy modified with the Spirit and Alternative rovers, whose groups began utilizing extra intentional names. As an illustration, the Alternative workforce nicknamed a crater “Endurance” to honor the ship that carried explorer Ernest Shackleton’s ill-fated expedition to Antarctica. The names for the spots the place Curiosity and Perseverance landed honor science-fiction writers Ray Bradbury and Octavia E. Butler, respectively. The InSight workforce named a rock that had been jostled by the lander’s retrorockets throughout landing “Rolling Stones Rock,” after the band. And the Curiosity workforce named a Martian hill after their colleague Rafael Navarro-González, who died from COVID-19 problems.

Earth on Mars

Regardless of occasional exceptions, the Curiosity and Perseverance missions stick with nicknames based mostly on terrestrial areas. Earlier than Curiosity landed in 2012, the rover’s workforce created a geological map of the touchdown space. They began by drawing a grid, making squares, or quadrants, equal to about 0.7 miles (1.2 kilometers) on either side. These quadrants can be themed round a web site of geological significance on Earth.

Then, as now, workforce members steered concepts for themes based mostly on websites the place they’ve labored or to which they’ve a private connection, and so they informally mentioned which might be essentially the most fascinating to incorporate, maintaining in thoughts that numerous names can be memorialized in future scientific papers. As soon as a theme is picked, tons of of names becoming into that theme are compiled. That many are wanted as a result of the accessible names can dwindle shortly, provided that Curiosity could keep in a quadrant for a number of months.

For Curiosity’s newest quadrant, the rover’s workforce selected a theme named after Roraima, the northernmost state of Brazil, and for Mount Roraima, the very best peak within the Pacaraima Mountains, positioned close to the border of Venezuela, Brazil, and Guyana. This marked the primary South American quadrant theme. The sulfate-enriched area Curiosity is presently exploring, with its flat-topped hills and steep slopes, reminded them of the “tabletop” mountains within the Pacaraima vary.

For Perseverance, scientists selected to go together with nationwide park themes. The rover is now exploring the Rocky Mountain quadrant and lately drilled into rocks at a location bearing the nickname of Rocky Mountain Nationwide Park’s “Powell Peak.”