Lunar mountain gets name
Lovell called feature on moon Mount Marilyn in wife’s honor
When Neil Armstrong steered the lunar lander to the Sea of Tranquility in 1969, one of the landmarks he eyeballed before settling on the moon’s surface was a triangularshaped mountain.
It was called Mount Marilyn on his NASA map.
A year earlier, when astronaut Jim Lovell was preparing for the first flight to the moon on Apollo 8, he noticed the geographical formation and named it after his wife, whom he met in the Juneau High School cafeteria in Milwaukee.
Mount Marilyn became a key landmark for the Apollo 10 and Apollo 11 moon missions. It was printed on maps, mentioned in the Tom Hanks blockbuster “Apollo 13” and recognized by Google. So when efforts began in 2014 to get the spot officially named Mount Marilyn, it seemed to Lovell it would be a slam dunk.
But the International Astronomical Union’s nomenclature committee said no.
Seems the same group that ignominiously dumped Pluto from its roster of planets ruled that Mount Marilyn didn’t fit its naming criteria, which includes using names of only dead people. Also, there were worries it would set a precedent for Mars when astronauts finally arrive on the Red Planet and start naming things.
But this summer, Lovell, 89, got word that the IAU had relented. Lovell broke the news to his 87-year-old wife in a way befitting a Navy pilot and veteran of several Gemini and Apollo space voyages.
“I told her we accomplished the mission,” Lovell said in a phone interview from his Lake Forest, Ill., home.
As he prepared for the first journey around the moon on Apollo 8 in 1968, one of Lovell’s tasks was to find a suitable landing spot for Apollo 11 in the Sea of Tranquility. He saw a pyramid-shaped mountain — about 30 kilometers by 25 kilometers by 22 kilometers — that looked lighter than surrounding sites.
“It was a stepping stone or landing mark the crew could use to land. It stood out by itself,” Lovell said.
It quickly became part of NASA maps and manuals.
“Marilyn thought that was very nice of me. At that time it was really just for Apollo 8, but Apollo 10 picked it up and 11 used it for their landing. Then it got into the media and eventually Google.”
Lovell knew that sites on the dark side of the moon are named after living people. Even he has a crater named after him as do the other two Apollo 8 astronauts, Frank Borman and Bill Anders.
In 2014, lunar scientist Mark Robinson was trying to correct annotations on features while helping make new maps of the moon and he realized that some of the names made during the Apollo expeditions had never been made official, including Mount Marilyn. He submitted the names for approval, something that’s done periodically.
“It got turned down and there was a long torturous
explanation why, which I never fully understood,” said Robinson, a professor at Arizona State.
He let the matter rest for a while but realizing the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 was coming up he decided to resubmit an application for Mount Marilyn, which included the radio transcript of when Buzz Aldrin mentioned the landmark. Mount Marilyn is roughly 500 kilometers from the Apollo 11 landing spot.
“One of them called it out because it was an important landmark. It’s an unusually shaped mountain that sticks up out of the (Sea of Tranquility) so it’s easy to spot,” Robinson said. “As far as I’m concerned, if Jim Lovell wants that mountain to be named Marilyn, based on his contributions to science, it should be named Mount Marilyn.”
Mount Marilyn is near a minor range of lunar mountains at the northwestern edge of the Sea of Tranquility called Montes Secchi, next to a crater named after 19th-century Italian astronomer Pietro
Secchi. Not surprisingly, Lovell thinks Marilyn is an easier name to remember than Secchi.
A date to the prom
Marilyn Gerlach grew up in Milwaukee, attended 27th Street Elementary School and Juneau High School, where the boy who would someday become an astronaut noticed her as he worked in the school cafeteria. She was a freshman, he was a junior.
“The prom was coming and I had to invite some girl to the prom, you had to invite junior girls. I invited a girl, but when she found out I wasn’t going to be prom king she dropped me like a hot potato. I didn’t have anyone else, so I invited Marilyn,” Lovell recalled.
They dated throughout high school. When Lovell attended the University of WisconsinMadison she visited him, and when he was chosen for the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., she transferred her credits from the Wisconsin State Teachers College to George Washington University in Washington, D.C., to be near him.
During his second year at the academy they were on a date in Annapolis when Lovell suggested they stop at a jewelry store to look at engagement rings. But he apparently forgot something.
“She’s always been mad at me about this,” Lovell said. “She said, ‘What do you mean?’ I said, ‘What kind of engagement ring.’ She said, ‘Are you proposing to me?’ I guess I forgot to add the formality to it. I thought it was a given. So I asked, ‘Do you want to marry me?’ “
She said yes. Her engagement ring was a duplicate of his academy class ring. Two years later, Lovell graduated from the Naval Academy at 11 a.m. and by 1 p.m. he and Marilyn were saying their vows. They celebrated their 65th wedding anniversary in June.
A photo of Mount Marilyn is framed and hanging at Adler Planetarium in Chicago, in the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum and the wall to the left of the entryway of the Lovells’ home.