My morning blog-read poses a question, and answers it

[major_clanger]

Reading io9 this morning I noted this story on how the naming scheme for plains on Titan has been approved as 'worlds from Frank Herbert's Dune series'. Yes, it's true - the USGS has confirmed it, and started by designating Chusuk Planitia.

Hmm, I wondered, who managed to convince them to go with this? Must have been an sf fan with some influence in the planetary astronomy community... and then I refreshed my LJ friends page. Ah, yes, brotherguy, I should have guessed that you were involved :-)

(Apropos my userpic, I don't think Frank Herbert ever mentioned a small world inhabited by creatures that communicated by whistling in the electromagnetic spectrum. Perhaps they were wiped out by the Imperial Sardaukar.)

Comments

[nmg.livejournal.com]

I've always wondered who named the craters around the landing site of Apollo 15 (namely: Rhysling, Dune, Earthlight and Kimball).

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

My understanding is that most of the small craters around the landing sites were given informal names either by mission planners or the crew themselves, because they were too small to have been officially named and presumably arbitrary designations such as 'crater 54F' would have been unmemorable and confusing. A similar sort of thing is ongoing with craters and rocks investigated by the Mars Rovers, which are named at the whim of the project staff.

In a nutshell, you have official IAU names for planets, moons and major features on them, and unofficial names for small local features as used for mission planning. Asteroid names seem to be an odd half-way house, being 'official' but at the discretion of the discoverer, subject to some rules regarding taste and the avoidance of political or religious controversy. This is why so many living people get asteroids named after them.