There is a process to naming features on the Red Planet like craters, valley, hills and more. NASA explains in their latest Mars Report.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
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TechTranscript
00:00 For more than two years, the Perseverance rover team has added over 850 names for Martian rocks,
00:05 drill targets, and other locations. And we're going to need a lot more.
00:08 But where did these names come from? Let's find out the process.
00:11 Here in the operations area for the Perseverance rover,
00:19 the team is driving into new Martian terrain every day, just like our other rover, Curiosity.
00:25 I'm joined today with Tina Seeger, who's going to tell us a little bit about her role on the rover teams and why it's important.
00:31 Well, I'm a geologist who studies rocks on Mars.
00:34 So just like on Earth, geologists on Mars rely on familiar names on a map to understand the landscape
00:39 and communicate with each other about the rocks seen by the rovers.
00:42 Curiosity and Perseverance are located in different craters more than 2,000 miles from each other
00:48 and naming rocks in those craters after places on Earth.
00:51 Curiosity just drilled Ubahara, named after a national park in Brazil,
00:55 and Perseverance is studying Belva Crater.
00:58 Belva is a town in West Virginia named after Belva Ann Lockwood, who was one of the first women to run for president.
01:03 So who decides the names on Mars?
01:06 Well, official names get assigned by the International Astronomical Union,
01:09 which has strict guidelines for features across the whole solar system.
01:13 Small craters on Mars must be named after small towns, like Belva,
01:17 or like Jezero, where Perseverance is located, which means "lake" in many Slavic languages.
01:22 Smaller features like rocks, cliffs, meteorites,
01:25 those get nicknames chosen by the rover teams that are not official, but they do stick.
01:30 How do you come up with the names for these smaller features, like rocks?
01:33 Well, in the '90s, they came up with names on the fly,
01:36 and that's why you got silly names like Barnacle Bill, Indiana Jones.
01:41 But now we compile lists of names ahead of time based on different themes.
01:44 We draw a grid on the map where each square is a different quadrant that represents a different theme.
01:50 Curiosity has used names from South America, Scotland,
01:54 Perseverance uses names from national parks around the world.
01:58 How were these names decided?
02:00 Names can come from anywhere in your imagination.
02:03 Going back to Pathfinder, a rock looked like the face of Yogi Bear and got the name Yogi Rock.
02:08 This meteorite is Heat Shield Rock, which sits near debris from Opportunity's heat shield.
02:12 Drilled rock samples that Perseverance has dropped for collection also have names,
02:16 like Bear Wallow, which is named after a hiking trail in Shenandoah National Park.
02:20 One of my favorite Curiosity targets is called Bonanza King,
02:24 which is named after the Bonanza King rock formation near Death Valley.
02:28 Here, we see an area that resembles a strip of bacon when viewed from space,
02:32 so we jokingly called it the Bacon Strip.
02:35 Since arriving at the site with Perseverance, we had to give it a name that fit the Shenandoah theme,
02:39 so we chose Hog Wallow Flats.
02:42 If you could come up with a name for a rock, what would it be?
02:45 I spent seven summers as the Night Skies Ranger at Mount Rainier National Park,
02:49 so I'd probably pick something named after Mount Rainier or a place that's special to me inside the park.
02:54 Luckily, I got to map the Mount Rainier Quadrant in Jezero Crater,
02:58 so if we drive through it, that dream might become a reality.
03:01 To get the latest updates on Curiosity and Perseverance,
03:04 follow @NASAJPL and @NASAMars on social media,
03:09 or take a deeper dive at mars.nasa.gov.
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