National Moon Day is coming up (July 20), which is a good time to ask: who gets to decide lunar place names?
I’ve always been fascinated by lunar place names, which often have a suitably otherworldly and melancholy air: Sea of Crises, Sea of Fecundity, Lake of Forgetfulness, Lake of Fear, Sea of the Edge.
It turns out there is a sort of hierarchy of lunar features, starting with the Maria (seas) and Oceanus (oceans), and moving through Lacus (lakes), Sinus (bays), Paludes (marshes) and Terrae (lands). These tend to have abstract names: Land of Cheerfulness, Bay of Trust, Bay of Rainbows, March of Decay, Marsh of Epidemics, Sea of Cleverness.
Then you move into things like valleys and mountains, impact craters, dorsa (wrinkle ridges), capes, rilles and escarpments.
There are so many craters they have their own Wikipedia page. These are the ones that tend to be names after individuals. And of course, the more features that become identified on the Moon’s surface, the more opportunities for someone getting named after one.
Most names are of scientists, engineers, astronomers and astronauts. There are craters near the Apollo Basin named after the moon-walkers and lost crews of Apollo 1, Challenger and Colombia. Craters near the Moon’s poles are named after polar explorers like Shackleton and Amundsen.
The naming process
Names are submitted to and approved by the International Astronomical Union (IAU). You can request a name be attached to a specific crater or other feature, but it may end up given to another. It’s not easy to nominate yourself either, unless (1) you are a scientist or explorer who has made a significant contribution; (2) you have been dead at least 3 years.
Uniquely, the crater Shoemaker — named after Gene Shoemaker, a specialist in craters, asteroids and comets, who but for ill health would have been the first geologist to walk on the moon – contains a small portion of his actual ashes, brought aloft by the Lunar Prospector spacecraft in 1998.
Though many space memorial flights have fired celebrity remains into space, he is thought to be the only person who lies on any celestial body outside Earth.
