Names to delight sci-fi fans
IT was an exciting time when the New Horizons spacecraft flew past the dwarf planet Pluto in July 2015, after a journey of nine years that had begun in 2006.
Almost making people forget the recent launch of the mission, the International Astronomical Union’s decision later that year to define the word planet, leaving Pluto as a dwarf planet, made the news to a much greater extent. It was even suggested that had that decision taken place well before the launch, there may have been second thoughts about the whole mission.
Fortunately, of course, that did not happen, and New Horizons’ fly-by of Pluto was one of the most rewarding of all space missions. Not only did it obtain a very large amount of information about Pluto, it returned spectacular and highly detailed images of Pluto and its largest moon, Charon.
Now, some of the features on Charon have been officially named and approved by the IAU, and several of these are rather delightful.
It was decided that Charon’s features be named after authors and artists associated with space exploration, fictional and mythological explorers and vessels, and milestones or destinations in exploration. That last category is, I feel, particularly relevant to this mission, as the Pluto system is the most distant ever visited by a spacecraft.
A group of Charon’s mountains has been named Clarke Montes (Clarke Mountains), after the famous science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke. He is probably best known for 2001: A Space Odyssey, although he has, of course, far more than that to his credit.
Another mountain has been named Kubrick Mons (Kubrick Mountain), after Stanley Kubrick, who was the director of the 2001 movie.
Moving away from the subject of mountains, a chasm on Charon has been named Argo Chasma. The Argo is the fictional ship in the Greek mythological story of Jason and the Argonauts on their search for the Golden Fleece.
There was also a constellation named Argo in the southern sky, which has been broken up into separate parts. It is currently seen quite high in our evening sky, to the right of and higher than the Southern Cross.
As with so many bodies in the solar system, there are many craters on Charon, and one of the most interesting of the new names is Dorothy Crater. Far from being the name of an author or director, Dorothy Gale is the fictional character from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, written in 1900 by Lyman Baum. Dorothy was later portrayed by Judy Garland in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz. These are just a few of the 12 names that have been approved, but of course there are many more features that have yet to be named. Some of the informal names for craters, which have not yet been officially approved, are Kirk, Spock, Sulu and Uhuru — characters from the original Star Trek series.
In addition, there are many parts of both Pluto and Charon that we have not yet seen clearly — and it will be a very long time before we have a complete detailed set of images of these bodies.
Pluto and Charon each rotate once every 6.4 days, and New Horizons’ close approach was very brief. The craft did not enter orbit for a long-term investigation like the famous studies of Saturn by Cassini and comet ChuryumovGerasimenko by Rosetta, or the very long-term studies of Mars by orbiting spacecraft and landers, just to name a few examples.
New Horizons is continuing on to study more of the region beyond Pluto. On January 1 next year, it will fly past the object called 2014 MU69, one of a huge number of objects more distant than the famous dwarf planet. That will be something to which we can very much look forward.