On February 18 , 2021 , a car - sized robotparachuted its elbow room down to the surface of Marsto commence searching for signs of ancient life on the Red Planet . From that daytime on , the landing place site where NASA ’s Perseverance rover plunk down became known as Octavia E. Butler , named after the prolific scientific discipline fiction generator behind many famous titles such as Parable of the Sower .
Ever since NASA began sending rovers to Mars , the blank space agency has had a tradition of cite features of the Martian terrain . Those names have varied from Indiana Jones , Barnacle Bill , and Scooby - Doo to more courtly ones such as Jezero Crater , name after a town in Bosnia and the Slavonic word for “ lake , ” and Endurance , after the ship that carried Ernest Shackleton ’s despatch to Antarctica . As it turns out , there ’s a method behind the blank government agency ’s key madness .
NASA has thousand of names for craters and hills on Mars , as well as every boulder , pebble , and rock’n’roll surface that the rovers come across . “ The No . 1 reasonableness we find fault all these epithet is to help the squad keep track of what they ’re finding each day , ” Ashwin Vasavada , the Curiosity missionary station ’s project scientist at NASA ’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory , said in astatement . “ Later on , we can refer to the many pitcher’s mound and rocks by name as we discuss them and eventually document our discovery . ”
A map of Jezero Crater, the area on Mars that the Perseverance rover is currently exploring.Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/USGS-Flagstaff/JHU-APL
More than 2,000 of those epithet have been approved by the International Astronomical Union ( the famously unpopular body of scientists responsible for downgrading Pluto to a dwarf major planet ) , and are therefore considered official . Thoseofficial namesalso accompany a set of rules put forth by IAU , submit , for example , that crater declamatory than 37 miles ( 60 kilometers ) are named after celebrated scientist or skill - fabrication source while small craters are call after towns with populations of less than 100,000 people , accord to NASA . Belva , an shock crater within Jezero , which the Perseverance rover is currently exploring , is named after a West Virginia town .
Beyond the prescribed name , NASA scientists get originative with unofficial cognomen of smaller feature that they run into on Mars . The team behind NASA ’s InSight mission nicknamed a rock as “ Rolling Stones Rock ” after it got tossed around from the lander ’s touchdown on Mars .
The nicknames are n’t always meant to be humorous , theCuriosity roverteam named a Martian hill after their colleague Rafael Navarro - González , who died from covid-19 complications .
This map shows all the quadrant themes for NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover.Graphic: NASA/JPL-Caltech/USGS-Flagstaff/University of Arizona
Mission teams also sometimes pick a theme for sites on Mars , compiling hundreds of nicknames concern to that theme . The Curiosity rover is currently explore a sulfate - enriched region of Mars , which is reminiscent of the Pacaraima Mountains , locate near the edge of Venezuela , Brazil , and Guyana . As a result , the rover team chose the first South American quadrant theme for that realm . Meanwhile , the Perseverance rover team blame internal park themes , select name such as the Rocky Mountain quadrant , which includes a Powell Peak rock surface area .
early missions adopted a more casual assignment summons , with random names like Cabbage Patch , Pop Tart and Yogi Rock being used for the Sojourner rover mission ( which land on Mars in 1997 ) . Sure , having a organisation in place is nice , but you would never bury where you last saw the Yogi Rock on Mars .
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