Martian Naming Madness

Macblaster writes "With the rise of robotic exploration of Mars, scientists are having difficulty naming all the new features they're discovering. Accepted name lists have fallen by the wayside, and now scientifically important features are named after everything from 80's bands to romantic interests." From the article: "Like European explorers who named the New World after their homes in the Old, the Mars scientists have filled the strange landscape of the Red Planet with a mishmash of modern life on Earth. The twin rover missions have forced scientists to come up with more than 4,000 names to mark everything from the majestic Columbia Hills to a few pebbles in the sand. The result is an extravagantly labeled map punctuated by the scientists' ever-changing preoccupations with history, holidays, monkeys, ice cream, cartoon characters, sushi, Mayan words, Scandinavian fish delicacies ... the list goes on and on."

Comments

Re:Is it really necessary?

[blowdart]

How long before someone is selling the rights to name a rock on ebay? NASA could probably raise the money for a mars mission within a year if they did that!

Cultural Phenom

[putko]

Names are a cultural phenomenon. People feel very strongly about names. E.g. some countries have lists of names, you must name your kid from the list (unless you are a foreigner -- then they usually let you off the hook).

Whites in American tend to have a set of names (large) that they pick from. They tend not to pick names at random (which is what this article is about). But poor whites will choose non-standard spellings for normal names.

Try to see what your own attitudes are to names, with this simple test:

There are some black NFL players with non-standard names. Here are 10 unique ones:

Laveranues
Na'il
Jerametrius
J'Vonne
Kenyatta
Dontarrious
Plaxico
LaDainian
Shirdonya
Keyaron

If you read that list of names and felt like laughing, you are probably not black, and you are probably offended that rocks on Mars are getting silly names.

On the other hand, if you don't care about those names and how non-standard they are, I bet you don't care what the rocks on Mars get called either.

Naming conventions

[syousef]

There is not unprecedented. There are around 6000 naked eye stars (total for both hemispheres under good seeing conditions with no light polution). No problems with naming the major ones and giving the others designations by constellation or according to one of many catalogues. (Only insanity here is there's a huge overlap between catalogs so one star can have many names).

There is incredible diversity in the number of species on Earth and again that's been no problem for science. (Okay the Latin is archaic now but it had its merits when the system was conceived).

The problem is that scientists are forgetting to be scientific and use their basic scientific tools - classification being one of the most powerful. Trouble is no scientist or NASA spokesperson wants to tell the public about his exciting discovery on rock NW2345, when it could be called Van Halen or some other name that would capture public imagination.

This is similar to the problems caused by coders who name their variables inane things from swearwords to girls names that have nothing to do with their purpose.

Auction some names off.

[Guano_Jim]

They should auction off naming rights for a few objects to the general public.

Put the funds towards an engineering scholarship for some kid who wants to work on the next mission.