NASA’s Perseverance rover is currently exploring rock outcrops along the rim of Mars’ Belva Crater. About 3,700 kilometers away, NASA’s Curiosity probe recently drilled a sample at a site called “Ubajara”. The crater bears an official name; the location of the drill bit is identified by a nickname, i.e. quotes.
Both names are among thousands applied by NASA missions not just to craters and hills, but to every boulder, pebble, and rock surface they study. The main reason we’re choosing all these names is to help the team keep track of what they’re finding every day,” said Ashwin Vasavada, project scientist for Curiosity at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
Since the beginnings 25 years ago when they used the names of cartoon characters, the way scientists have come up with identifiers has evolved. Here’s a closer look.
Official names
The difference between an official name on Mars and an unofficial one is seemingly simple: Official nicknames have been approved by a group of scientists known as the International Astronomical Union (IAU). The IAU sets standards for naming planetary elements and records the names in the Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature.
For example, craters larger than 37 miles (60 kilometers) are named after famous scientists or science fiction authors; smaller craters are named after cities with populations of less than 100,000 people. The Jezero crater that Perseverance explored has the same name as a Bosnian town; Belva, an impact crater in the Lake. More than 2,000 places on Mars have official names, but the map of Mars is dotted with even more unofficial nicknames.
Evolving nicknames
Early missions to Mars sometimes took a strange route with nicknames, even using the names of cartoon characters. “Yogi Rock,” “Casper,” and “Scooby-Doo” were among the unofficial names used by the team behind NASA’s first rover, Sojourner, in the late 1990s.
The philosophy changed with the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, whose teams began using more intentional names. For example, the Opportunity team named the crater “Endurance” after the ship that carried explorer Ernest Shackleton’s ill-fated expedition to Antarctica. The names of the Curiosity and Perseverance landing sites honor science fiction writers Ray Bradbury and Octavia E. Butler.
Earth on Mars
Despite occasional exceptions, the Curiosity and Perseverance missions stick to nicknames based on Earth locations. Before Curiosity landed in 2012, the rover team created a geological map of the landing area. They began by drawing a grid, creating squares or quadrants, equivalent to about 0.7 miles (1.2 kilometers) on each side. These quadrants would be themed around a geologically significant place on Earth.
Then, as now, team members suggested topic ideas based on sites they had worked at or had a personal connection to and informally discussed which would be most interesting to include, keeping in mind that different names would be remembered for future scholarly work. Once a theme is chosen, hundreds of names are compiled to fit that theme. That much is needed because the available names may dwindle quickly given that Curiosity may remain in the quadrant for several months.
For Curiosity’s newest quadrant, the rover team chose a theme named after Roraima, Brazil’s northernmost state, and Mount Roraima, the highest peak in the Pacaraima Mountains, located near the borders of Venezuela, Brazil and Guyana. This marked the first South American quadrant theme. The sulfate-rich area Curiosity is currently exploring, with its flat-topped hills and steep slopes, reminded them of the “table” mountains in the Pacaraima range.
For Perseverance, the researchers decided to go with national park themes. The rover is now exploring the Rocky Mountain Quadrant and recently drilled into rocks at a site nicknamed “Powell Peak” of Rocky Mountain National Park.
