How and Why NASA Gives a Name to Every Spot It Studies on Mars
upstart writes:
NASA's Perseverance rover is currently investigating rock outcrops alongside the rim of Mars's Belva Crater. Some 2,300 miles (3,700 kilometers) away, NASA's Curiosity rover recently drilled a sample at a location called "Ubajara." The crater bears an official name; the drill location is identified by a nickname, hence the quotation marks.
Both names are among thousands applied by NASA missions not just to craters and hills, but also to every boulder, pebble, and rock surface they study.
[...] The difference between an official name on Mars and an unofficial one is seemingly simple: Official monikers have been approved by a body of scientists known as the International Astronomical Union (IAU). The IAU sets standards for naming planetary features and logs the names in the Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature.
For example, craters larger than 37 miles (60 kilometers) are named for famous scientists or science-fiction authors; smaller craters are named after towns with populations of less than 100,000 people. Jezero Crater, which Perseverance has been exploring, shares the name with a Bosnian town; Belva, an impact crater within Jezero, is named after a West Virginia town that is, in turn, named after Belva Lockwood, the suffragist who ran for president in 1884 and 1888.
[...] Early Mars missions sometimes took a whimsical route with nicknames, even using cartoon character names. "Yogi Rock," "Casper," and "Scooby-Doo" were among the unofficial names applied by the team behind NASA's first rover, Sojourner, in the late 1990s.
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