Broca's Brain - Carl Sagan [94]
Some Martian and lunar craters are named after the same individuals. This is the Portland case again, and I think it will cause very little confusion in practice. It does have at least one salutary benefit: on Mars there is today a large crater named Galileo. It is about the same size as the one named Ptolemaeus. And there are no craters on Mars named Scheiner or Riccioli.
Another unexpected consequence of the Mariner 9 mission is that the first close-up photographs of the moons of another planet were obtained. Maps now exist which show about half the surface features on the two Martian moons, Phobos and Deimos (the attendants of the war god, Mars). A subcommittee on Mars satellite nomenclature which I chaired assigned craters on Phobos to astronomers who had studied the moons. A prominent crater at Phobos’ south pole is named after Asaph Hall, the discoverer of both moons. Astronomical apocrypha has it that Hall was on the verge of giving up his search for the Martian moons when he was directed by his wife to return to the telescope. He promptly discovered them and named them “fear” (Phobos) and “terror” (Deimos). Accordingly, the largest crater on Phobos was given Mrs. Hall’s maiden name, Angelina Stickney. Had the impacting object that excavated crater Stickney been any larger, it probably would have shattered Phobos.
Deimos is reserved for writers and others who were in some way involved with speculations about the moons of Mars. The two most prominent features are named after Jonathan Swift and Voltaire, who, in their speculative romances, Gulliver’s Travels and Micromégas, respectively, prefigured before the actual discovery the existence of two moons around Mars. I wanted to name a third Deimonic crater after René Magritte, the Belgian surrealist whose paintings “Le Château des Pyrénées” and “Le Sens de Réalité” pictured large rocks, suspended in the sky, of an aspect astonishingly like the two Martian moons—except for the presence in the first painting of a castle, which, so far as we know, does not surmount Phobos. The suggestion was, however, voted down as frivolous.
THIS IS THE moment in history when the features on the planets will be named forever. A crater name represents a substantial memorial: the estimated lifetime of large lunar, Martian and Mercurian craters is measured in billions of years. Because of the enormous recent increase in the number of surface features that need to be named—and also because the names of almost all dead astronomers have already been given to one or another celestial object—a new approach is needed. At the IAU meeting in Sydney, Australia, in 1973, several committees were appointed to look into questions of planetary nomenclature. One clear problem is that if craters on other planets are now named after a category other than people, we will be left with only the names of astronomers and a few others on the Moon and planets. It would be charming to name craters on, say, Mercury, after birds or butterflies, or cities or ancient vehicles of exploration and discovery. But if we accept this course, we will leave the impression on globes and maps and textbooks that we esteem only astronomers and physicists; that we care nothing for poets, composers, painters, historians, archaeologists, playwrights, mathematicians, anthropologists, sculptors, physicians, psychologists, novelists, molecular biologists, engineers and linguists. The proposal that such individuals be commemorated with unassigned lunar craters would result, say, in Dostoevsky or Mozart or Hiroshige assigned craters a tenth of a mile across, while Pitiscus is 52 miles