[meteorite-list] Pluto's Twin Moons Get Their Names

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Tue Jun 20 21:07:25 2006
Message-ID: <200606210105.SAA04709_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2006/620/1

Pluto's Twins Get Their Names
By Govert Schilling
ScienceNOW Daily News
20 June 2006

Pluto's baby twin moons, formerly known as S/2005 P 1 and S/2005 P 2,
have been christened Nix and Hydra. The objects, discovered last year by
the Hubble Space Telescope, received their names from the International
Astronomical Union (IAU). A formal announcement will be issued this
Friday, 23 June.

The names were proposed this spring by the discovery team, who first
identified the moons in May of last year. "We had a giant list of
possible names to consider," says team member Andrew Steffl of the
Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. "It was a fun thing
to do."

In mythology, Pluto ruled the underworld. Nyx was the goddess of night
and the mother of Charon, the boatsman who takes souls across the River
Styx and into Pluto's grasp. Pluto's large satellite, discovered in
1978, is called Charon. Because an asteroid with the name Nyx already
exists, the IAU decided to use a slightly different spelling for the
inner one of the two small Plutonian moons, to avoid confusion. Hydra
was the mythological nine-headed serpent that guarded the underworld. A
large but inconspicuous constellation in the spring sky also bears this
name.

Pluto-philes read even more significance into the two names. The first
letters, N and H, also refer to NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, which
was launched in January and is now on its way to an encounter with the
Pluto system in the summer of 2015. And according to the team,
nine-headed Hydra is a fitting companion for the ninth planet. This
summer, the IAU will decide on the much-discussed planetary status of
Pluto. The naming of Hydra "could possibly" help convince the IAU to
preserve Pluto's planethood, says Steffl.

James Christy, the now-retired discoverer of Charon, says he would have
preferred Persephone--Pluto's involuntary spouse--as the name for one of
the satellites, but again, that name has already been used for an
asteroid. Back in 1978, Christy chose Charon to honor his wife Charlene.
"Names are very important," says space physicist Fran Bagenal of the
University of Colorado. "They make it easier for people to relate to
cosmic objects." If galaxies were known as Tom, Dick, and Harry instead
of some arcane catalog number, she says, more people would probably take
up an interest in astronomy.
Received on Tue 20 Jun 2006 09:05:07 PM PDT