Tenzing Montes and Hillary Montes are mountain ranges honouring Tenzing Norgay (1914-1986) and Sir Edmund Hillary (1919-2008), the Indian/Nepali Sherpa and New Zealand mountaineer who were the first to reach the summit of Mount Everest and return safely.Īl-Idrisi Montes honours Ash-Sharif al-Idrisi (1100-1165/66), a noted Arab mapmaker and geographer whose landmark work of medieval geography is sometimes translated as 'The Pleasure of Him Who Longs to Cross the Horizons.'ĭjanggawul Fossae defines a network of long, narrow depressions named for the Djanggawuls, three ancestral beings in indigenous Australian mythology who travelled between the island of the dead and Australia, creating the landscape and filling it with vegetation. Sputnik Planitia is a large plain named after Sputnik 1, the first space satellite, launched by the Soviet Union in 1957. Later in life she taught mathematics and economics. astronomer who discovered Pluto in 1930 from Lowell Observatory in Arizona.īurney crater honors Venetia Burney (1918-2009), who as an 11-year-old schoolgirl suggested the name 'Pluto' for Clyde Tombaugh's newly discovered planet. Tombaugh Regio honours Clyde Tombaugh (1906-1997), the U.S. The approved Pluto surface feature names are listed below: 'The approved designations honour many people and space missions who paved the way for the historic exploration of Pluto and the Kuiper Belt, the most distant worlds ever explored,' said Alan Stern, New Horizons Principal Investigator from the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado. More names are expected to be proposed to the IAU, both for Pluto and for its moons. 'We appreciate the contribution of the general public in the form of their their naming suggestions and the New Horizons team for proposing these names to us.' These names highlight the importance of pushing to the frontiers of discovery,' said Rita Schulz, chair of the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature. 'We're very excited to approve names recognising people of significance to Pluto and the pursuit of exploration as well as the mythology of the underworld. Other names had been used informally by the New Horizons science team to describe the many regions, mountain ranges, plains, valleys and craters discovered during the first close-up look at the surfaces of Pluto and its largest moon, Charon. Some of the names were suggested by members of the public during the Our Pluto campaign, which was launched as a partnership between the IAU, the New Horizons project and the SETI Institute. NASA's New Horizons team proposed the names to the IAU following the first reconnaissance of Pluto and its moons by the New Horizons spacecraft.

Pluto's first official surface-feature names are marked on this map, compiled from images and data gatheredīy NASA's New Horizons spacecraft during its flight through the Pluto system in 2015 This is the first set of official names of surface features on Pluto to be approved by the IAU, the internationally recognised authority for naming celestial bodies and their surface features. The names pay homage to the underworld mythology, pioneering space missions, historic pioneers who crossed new horizons in exploration, and scientists and engineers associated with Pluto and the Kuiper Belt.

The IAU has assigned names to fourteen geological features on the surface of Pluto.

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