How and why does NASA name each rock it explores on Mars?

Over the years, the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has sent five robotic vehicles. Rovers To Mars. Their names are: a foreigner, the spirit, Opportunity, curiosity y Persistence.

Sent since 1997, baptizing them somehow makes it easier for the technical and scientific teams responsible for them to compile and organize everything related to each task without confusing anything.

Like Earth, Mars has volcanoes, valleys, and flat plains worthy of analysis and possible explanations for its past. However, since Rovers Reaching its red surface, NASA has created a soft spot to name just about anything Round Find it.

For example, last Round The messenger, persevering, examines the rocks at the edge of the Belva crater. About 3,700 kilometers away, another Round (Curiosity), recently drilled a sample at “Upajara”.

The crater has an official name, but the location where Curiosity drilled is identified by a nickname (hence the quotation marks).

Both names are among the thousands of names applied not only to craters and hills, but to every rock, boulder, stone, and rock surface studied.

Because?

“The primary reason we chose all these names was to help the team track their discoveries every day,” said Ashwin Vasavada, project scientist for the Curiosity mission at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

“Then, we can name many mountains and rocks as we discuss them and eventually document our findings,” the researcher was quoted as saying in the NASA statement.

The way scientists come up with identifiers has evolved from the early days of using cartoon character names 25 years ago. Now another coherent logic follows which makes everything easier.

Official names and nicknames

The difference between an official name and an unofficial name (pseudonyms) on Mars is simple: the official ones are recognized by a formal scientific body, such as the International Astronomical Union (IAU), which establishes standards for naming planetary features and records the names. The Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature.

For example, large craters more than 60 kilometers long are named after famous scientists or science fiction authors. Names of cities with a population of less than 100,000 are lowercase.

The diligently explored Jezero Crater shares the name of the Bosnian city; Belva, an impact crater in Jesero, was named after the West Virginia town, which in turn was named after Belva Lockwood, a suffragette who ran for president in 1884 and 1888.

More than 2,000 places on Mars have official names, but Mars maps still have unofficial nicknames.

Early missions to Mars took a strange path based on nicknames, sometimes using the names of cartoon characters. This explains the spelling of “Yogi Rock”, “Casper” and “Scooby-Doo”. Round (Sojourner) in the late 1990s.

Philosophy changed with Rovers Spirit and Chance, its teams began using more deliberate names.

For example, the Prospect team nicknamed a crater “Endurance,” after the ship that carried explorer Ernest Shackleton’s ill-fated expedition to Antarctica.

Curiosity and Perseverance are named after science fiction writers Ray Bradbury and Octavia E. Butler, respectively.

Another group named a rock pushed by the lander’s retrorockets during landing as “Rolling Stones Rock” after the band.

The Curiosity team named the Mars mount after one of their colleagues, Rafael Navarro-Gonzalez, who died of complications from Covid-19.

Earth on Mars

Despite occasional exceptions, Curiosity and Persistence missions stick with monikers based on geographic locations.

Before Curiosity landed in 2012, the team Round Created a geological map of the landing area. They start by drawing a grid and create squares or quadrants, approximately 1.2 kilometers on each side. These quadrants correspond to a site of geological significance on Earth.

Then, as now, panel members suggested ideas for topics based on sites they had worked on or had a personal connection to, and informally discussed which would be most interesting to include, keeping in mind that many names would be remembered in future scientific papers. .

Once a theme is selected, hundreds of names that fit that theme are compiled. Since Curiosity will be in a quadrant for several months, the available names will quickly dwindle, so many are needed.

For Curiosity’s last quadrant, the rover team chose a theme named after Roraima, the northernmost region of Brazil and the highest peak of the Pasaraima Mountains, located near the Venezuelan border. , Brazil and Guyana.

This marked the first issue of the South American Quadrilateral. The sulfate-enriched area Curiosity is currently exploring, with its flat hills and steep slopes, reminded them of the “table” mountains in the Pasaraima range.

For diligence, scientists chose national park themes. That Round He is now exploring the Rocky Mountain Quadrangle and recently drilled rocks at the nicknamed “Powell Peak” in Rocky Mountain National Park.