[meteorite-list] What's in a Name? It Depends on Who's Doing the Naming

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Tue Jun 15 13:07:37 2004
Message-ID: <200406151707.KAA21272_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/spotlight/spirit/a24_20040602.html

What's in a Name? It Depends on Who's Doing the Naming
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
June 2, 2004

Less than two weeks after Spirit landed on Mars, rover engineers and
scientists were already planning Spirit's itinerary on the surface. "Go
To That Crater And Turn Right" read the headline of a January 13 press
release.

http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/newsroom/pressreleases/20040113a.html

Needless to say, generically referring to features as "that crater,"
"this rock," or "these hills" could quickly become confusing.

"That Crater" was soon named Bonneville Crater. Why? And How? Those are
some of the most frequent questions from visitors to NASA's Mars
Exploration Rover site.

In Bonneville Crater's case, scientists searching for the record of past
water on Mars wanted to see a little bit of Utah on the red planet.
Prehistoric Utah, to be precise, when today's Great Salt Lake was once
the mega-Lake Bonneville. Geologists can still find signs of its ancient
shoreline terracing Utah's mountains and valleys--and hoped to find
signs of past water in the martian rock record as well.

International Rules for Naming Features on Mars

"We give names to features near the rovers for convenience," said Dr.
Tim Parker, a JPL geologist working on the rover mission. "But it's
important to remember they're all unofficial."

The International Astronomical Union (IAU), which fosters international
cooperation in astronomy among its member countries and individual
scientists, is ultimately responsible for naming land features on
planets and their moons. [More
<http://www.iau.org/IAU/Activities/nomenclature/> on IAU's Naming Process]

In fact, the IAU already has a set of guidelines for names on Mars,
explained Parker.

IAU Guidelines for Naming Craters on Mars

Craters less than 100 kilometers (62 miles) in diameter are named after
towns on Earth with fewer than 100,000 people. For example, a rural
school in New Plymouth, Idaho (population under 1400) submitted their
town's name to the IAU. New Plymouth Crater was formally accepted as the
official name of a small crater coincidentally near Gusev Crater where
Spirit landed.

Craters wider than 100 kilometers are named after late planetary
scientists. Using that scheme, a large crater might someday be named
after Carl Sagan or Eugene Shoemaker. One has been named after Hal
Masursky, a geologist who spent his career at NASA and the US Geological
Survey studying lunar and planetary surfaces and the best places for
landing.

IAU Guidelines for Naming Mountains and Plains on Mars

Mountains and plains are named after the nearest feature described on
the basis of its albedo, or brightness, by the astronomers Schiaparelli,
Antoniadi, and others who first began mapping Mars in the 19th and early
20th centuries.

An example is the name Nix Olympica, the classical albedo name, which
exists side by side with the geographic name Olympus Mons, used by the
U.S. Geological Survey, to designate the largest volcano in the solar
system.

That volcano just happens to be covered with snow (nix means snow in
Latin) like the famed Mount Olympus of Greek mythology. Both names are
official.

Another example is Sinus Meridiani, which means "Middle Bay," applied by
the 19th-century astronomer Flammarion to the area where the Opportunity
rover landed, on a plain called Meridiani Planum.

Unofficial Feature Names for the Rover Mission

Meanwhile, back at JPL, scientists have devised a system of names that
serve as labels for the time being.

After the two robotic rovers landed on Mars in January, Dr. Jim Rice, a
geologist at Arizona State University and a rover science team member,
suggested that features studied during the mission should be named
according to a theme. Principal investigator Dr. Steve Squyres, a
geologist at Cornell University, said, "OK, you're in charge."

Rice was the perfect choice for the task. He is practically a walking
encyclopedia of interesting historical facts about geological
exploration. He also has a friendly way of talking in a deep Southern
drawl from his native Alabama that puts other people at ease when
they're under pressure to get a thousand things done and are being asked
to do just one more thing.

Rice suggested some themes and names and had team members take a vote.
They decided to name craters near Spirit's landing site after lakes on
Earth and craters near Opportunity's landing site after famous ships of
exploration. Rice and Squyres then began assigning names from a list
that Rice created.

Craters Named for Lakes Near Spirit's Landing Site

Naming Bonneville Crater started the trend in naming craters encountered
by Spirit for lakes on Earth. Another crater at the Spirit site is named
"Turkana," after a lake in the African Rift Valley.

"That's the kind of name I like because that's where anthropologists
found the earliest hominid fossils, in the Olduvai Gorge region," said
Rice.

"Let's see, then we also had Lake Vanda," said Rice. "That's an
ice-covered lake in Antarctica."

"That was kind of neat," Rice adds, "because both Steve and I have done
scuba diving in ice-covered lakes in Antarctica. Opportunity recently
discovered that a lake once existed in the Meridiani Planum region. I
think that Martian lakes most likely did have ice covers on them."

Also at the Spirit site, there's "Lahontan Crater," after an ancient
lake that was once in Nevada and California. On Earth, Lake Lahontan no
longer has any water as a result of climate change since the Pleistocene
Epoch, when much of North America was covered by ice sheets. Some
scientists think that Mars, too, may have undergone climate change and
loss of surface water.

Similarly, "Missoula Crater" was named after glacial Lake Missoula,
which occupied portions of present-day Montana and Idaho. Lake Missoula
periodically breached its ice dam 13,000 to 15,000 years ago and
unleashed a series of catastrophic floods that created the channeled
scablands in Washington.

Unofficially, there's now a "Tecopa Crater" on Mars after an ancient
lake near Death Valley in California; "Huron Crater" after one of the
Great Lakes; and "Baikal Crater" after the world's deepest lake in Russia.

Famous Ships of Exploration

At the Opportunity site, craters are about the only thing to be seen on
an otherwise wind-swept plain. In fact, the rover managed to land in a
tiny crater in a vast sea of flatness. That crater was named "Eagle
Crater" after the Apollo 11 lunar module that carried Neil Armstrong and
Buzz Aldrin to the surface of the moon for the first human lunar landing
on July 20, 1969.

There's also "Fram Crater," named after a ship used by Norwegian
explorer Roald Amundsen. Fram means "forward" or "onward" in Norwegian.

"Fram was a famous scientific vessel that conducted an awful lot of
important work in the Arctic," said Rice, "but it's most famous for
taking Amundsen and his team to Antarctica where he led the first team
to reach the South Pole on December 14, 1911."

"Endurance Crater," a spectacular crater that features several meters of
a layered rock outcrop and debris, was named in honor of the famously
ill-fated expedition of Ernest Shackleton to Antarctica aboard the
Endurance.

"Endurance is a fitting name because at the time, we were thinking,
'It's going to be a long haul to get there. It's going to test our
endurance,'" said Rice. "Plus it was Shackleton's ship."

Commemorative, Colorful, and Historical Names

On occasion, the names reflect other human considerations, both serious
and fanciful.

Heroes Remembered

NASA Headquarters named the "Columbia Hills," a mile or so from Spirit's
landing site, in honor of the lost space shuttle Columbia. Each of the
seven peaks bears, at least for now, the last name of one of the
Columbia astronauts - Husband, McCool, Anderson, Chawla, Brown, Clark,
and Ramon.

Similarly, three hills near the Spirit landing site were named for the
three Apollo 1 astronauts Grissom, White, and Chaffee, who died in a
flash fire during a dress rehearsal on the launch pad one month before
their scheduled launch.

A Travelogue of Place Names

By the time Mars rover team members got around to labeling individual
features in the craters, such as individual rocks studied by the rovers,
they were no longer following a particular theme. Basically, whoever got
to work on analyzing a feature first got to christen it, said Rice.

Many of the nicknames are place names - "Route 66" after the famous
interstate highway; "Mazatzal" after a mountain range in Arizona and
piece of the North American continent that is more than 1 billion years
old; "Guadalupe" and "McKittrick" after mountains in Texas and New
Mexico that are famous for fossils, caves, and, in this case, rocks left
behind after the evaporation of a shallow sea.

Similarly, there's "Adirondack" (New York), "Tamamend Park"
(Pennsylvania), "Camelback" (Arizona), "Stone Mountain" (Georgia), and
"Zugspitze" (Germany), to name a few. There's also "Namib" and
"Kalahari" after deserts of the same name.

A few of the names are hard to pronounce. John Grotzinger of MIT, a
science team member, gave the name "Karatepe" to one of the outcrops in
Endurance Crater. It turns out Karatepe (pronounced care-uh-tep-pee) is
an archaeological site bearing a bilingual inscription in Phoenician and
Hittite. The Phoenician inscription enabled historians to translate
Hittite hieroglyphics for the first time. Similarly, the rock outcrop
first studied by Opportunity may one day provide "a translation code"
for understanding rock layers and climate on Mars overall.

Rock and Mineral "Flavors": Blueberries and Ice Cream

Often, team members name surface features for objects that they
resemble. "Early one Saturday morning back in February, I suggested the
name blueberries to describe the hematite-rich spherical particles and
it has stuck ever since then," said Rice. The spheres appeared "bluish"
due to the camera filter that was used for one of the false-color images.

One day, team members named soil textures after flavors of ice cream.
They stocked the martian freezer with names like "Mudpie," "Coconut,"
"Cookies and Cream," and "Chocolate Chip."

Chocolate Chip refers to the dark, BB-size spherules ("blueberries") of
hematite scattered on the Martian surface and perhaps to the fact that
team members longed for refreshment during a record-breaking heat wave
in Southern California.

Some Animal References

While the science team hasn't been reminded of many animals in the
shapes of rocks, they did nickname one rock "Shark Tooth" given its
pointed shape.

They also nicknamed a sand drift "Serpent," which unfortunately later
looked something like a smashed serpent where the rover's wheels scuffed
the surface to reveal the underlying sediment.

People

In a few instances, features are named after people. An example is
"Burns Cliff" at Endurance Crater, named after the late Roger Burns, an
MIT mineralogist who predicted people might one day find jarosite on
Mars. Opportunity actually did find jarosite, an iron sulfate mineral
that typically forms when water circulates through and alters iron-rich
sediments and rocks. Jarosite was one of the clues that Meridiani Planum
was once a water-soaked place.

There's also "Larry's Leap," informally named after science team member
Larry Soderblom, a veteran of planetary missions who first suggested
taking a rover "toe-dip" (or, wheel dip!) inside Endurance Crater on a
relatively shallow slope. (Soderblom, however, did not suggest the name.)

Naming: It's Something Humans Do

Given that none of the names are official and most will probably not
survive IAU scrutiny, why bother to give names at all?

As Rice noted: "Whenever explorers go somewhere, we always want to name
things. Everybody on this team has named at least one thing, I think
it's safe to say, on this mission, one way or the other now. It just
makes it more personal. It allows one to leave their little mark on the
surface of another planet."

Plus, in a world of technical reports to peers, names have a practical
application.

"When I was working at the U.S. Geological Survey in grad school, I was
mapping a quadrangle on Mars," said Rice. "When it comes to writing
scientific papers, you don't want to keep referring to a crater or other
landmarks by their latitude and longitude coordinates. It gets boring
and you get tired of writing those coordinates. So you give it a name.
It's just something we humans like to do."
Received on Tue 15 Jun 2004 01:07:24 PM PDT