The Real Origin Of Some Notable Pluto Nomenclature
Keith’s note: On 10 January 2008 Sir Edmund Hillary, one of two humans to first stand atop Mt. Everest died. I sent Alan Stern, then AA for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate an email: “I hope you name a new, large feature on Mercury after Edmund Hillary – and Tenzing Norgay…” Stern promptly sent an email to MESSENGER PI Sean Solomon saying “Sean-As you may have seen in the past few hours, Sir Edmund Hillary died today. Let’s name prominent features for him and Tenzing Norgay on Mercury. It’s ALL about exploration.” Solomon concurred. Eventually it became clear that the IAU only wanted to name things on Mercury after painters for some unexplained reason.
Flash forward to July 2015 – mountain ranges on Pluto have been provisionally named “Hillary Montes” and “Norgay Montes”. According to the Washington Post “For many years, we referred to Pluto as the Everest of planetary exploration,” New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern said in a statement. “It’s fitting that the two climbers who first summited Earth’s highest mountain, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, now have their names on this new Everest.” I hope the names stick. That said, who first suggested it to Stern? Just sayin’.
For completness sake our Science Team on the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit honored Hillary, Norgay and Everest at the summit of Husband Hill back in 2005:
http://mars.nasa.gov/mer/ga…
So what were the elevations of those features on Mars?
These areas were in the Columbia Hills which were fairly small hills ~ 110 m high.
Yes and there are lots of nice tributes for various ships of polar exploration in the area too.
There’s an internationally agreed-upon schema for planetary feature names. If anyone is interested, take a look at the Planetary Nomenclatures pages at the USGS.
Specifically, this is the page that outlines the categories of names for features by solar system object: http://planetarynames.wr.us…
Types of geologic features are labeled using Latin; the key (for those who have forgetten what the ablative absolute is all about) is here: http://planetarynames.wr.us…
And here are the IAU (Int’l Astronomical Union) rules: http://planetarynames.wr.us…
Poke around at the site. It’s not quite the free-for-all it sometines seems, and they are trying to keep the naming process dignified.
As for informal names, such as those used on the rover missions, the rule of thumb seems to be to use names for outcrops and targets that are related to exploration or famous geologic or mining areas.
The issue driving this is that the rovers are examining and collecting data on a lot of targets and sites which absolutely have to have working names to be useful. While these may never become formalized via the IAU’s rules, the nicknames will likely stand forever.
For example, take Adirondack rock in Gusev Crater. It even has its own wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wi… And the Mars geology literature has numerous mentions of “Adirondack-class rocks”.
I follow this somewhat and I’ve been inpressed by the sensible decisions taken by those who are doing the (nick)naming.