The SMART-1 team has released an image of the Apollo 11 landing site:

http://www.esa.int/esaSC/SEM1O6BUQPE_index_1.html

for the 37th anniversary of the landing. In the release, they label two craters as Aldrin and Collins, with a mention of a third crater, Armstrong, off frame. It is my understanding that one has to be deceased in order for surface features on other worlds to be named after you...

These names were approved by the IAU in 1970. They either didn't have that rule at the time or (more likely) made an exception in this case.

From Wikipedia:

QUOTE

[Giambattista] Riccioli's naming scheme was formally established as the doctrinal lunar nomenclature by a vote of the IAU in 1935, which gave standard names to 600 lunar features.

The system was later expanded and updated by the IAU during the 1960s, but the new designations were limited to the names of deceased scientists. After Soviet spacecraft photographed the far side of the Moon, many of the newly-discovered features were named after Soviet scientists and engineers. All subsequent names have been assigned by the IAU, although were assigned to still-living individuals, such as astronauts in Project Apollo.

Thanks. I just thought it was odd to see features named after people that were still living.

Grr, and I have to live with features named after a mythological seafearer and a lake in NE Kansas...

Yes, the IAU nomeclature policy can be nettlesome. If for no other reason, it deprives male planetary scientists of using the Magellan data for a classic pick-up line on females: "How would you like a crater on Venus to be named after you? I can make it happen."

Believe it or not, I actually saw a guy try this line out while using a NASA lithograph from Magellan as a prop

The IAU had to approve those Soviet names too - the Wikipedia article suggests they didn't. Some of the Luna 3 names were approved (Giordano Bruno, Tsiolkovskiy, Jules Verne, Mare Moscoviense), some were not (Mare Mechta, Astronaut Bay, Soviet Mountains). None of the Zond 3 designations were accepted, though some showed up later attached to other features - with one exception, Korolev. After Apollo 8, that crew plus some living Soviet cosmonauts (e. g. Leonov, Tereshkova) were named on the far side. Then after Apollo 11 that crew received designations near their landing site. But those living astronaut/cosmonaut names are exceptions to a rule still in place. The Columbia crew for instance still had to wait their three years. If you want to have something named after you and you aren't willing to make the ultimate sacrifice just yet, your best bet is an asteroid, where they'll take anyone dead or alive.

Phil

... and an on-topic reply for once - remember all that stuff at the start of the mission (from the stupid media, not the mission team, I think) about how SMART-1 would image the old landing sites and prove the landings were real? Not at this resolution!

Phil

Well - it has been done. Levaillant, a french 18th century ornithologist, promised a south-african girlfriend that he would name the most beautiful bird he discovered after her and thus we have Apaloderma narina Narina's Trogon.
Though I imagine most women would prefer have a pretty bird named after them rather than a red-hot hole in the ground.

tty

159m/pixel - the entire Apollo 11 experience, the LEM, every step they took....would be swallowed by a single pixel.

Doug

"That's one small pixel for SMART, one giant leap for mankind..."

The pixel dimension doesn't have a one-to -one correspondence with the magnitude of the achievement...happy belated 1ML Day, everyone!

Wish that I could live long enough to see the Apollo 11 site preserved & enshrined as a monument for all humanity...in a thousand years or so, this landing may well be all that school=children somewhere else remember about the existence of the United States (or even the Earth itself?) for their tests....talk about profound!

I think some of these things (like the Soviet Mountains) were found to be mistaken photo interpretation. The Russians were pretty fair about naming things after scientists from a variety of nations, even including a crater named "Edison".

Why did the IAU reject the Zond-3 names? Shouldn't the first discoverer have priority? Was the IAU pressured for political reasons to reject Soviet names?

Right, Don. The Soviet Mountains were really a complex of crater rays, so that name was dropped. Astronaut's Bay (note they didn't use the term Cosmonaut in 1959!) - Zaliv Astronavtov - was too indistinct to warrant a name, and so was 'More Mechta' , The Sea of Mechta - i.e. The Sea Of Luna 1 (not really 'Sea of Dreams' as some have mis-translated it).

The Zond 3 name thing is probably mentioned in Ewen Whitaker's 'mapping and naming the Moon' which I don't have in front of me right now to look up. I think they were not just picked up as they were because the IAU was in the middle of trying to decide how this whole problem of new names should be handled, and when they did develop a scheme - with Soviet participation, remember - it differed from the original set of names. The Russians were active in all of this at IAU, they weren't excluded.

But there's more to this story. When Apollo 8 flew to the Moon the project wanted names to refer to features to help interpret crew observations. But no farside names except Luna 3 were available. So they annotated a copy of the ACIC farside chart with a set of temporary labels. These were called "Farside Communication Designators", and were never proposed or intended as official names. They included names of Apollo astronauts - Schmitt, Lovell, Armstrong etc., and places - Texas, Florida, Houston etc., and others associated with Apollo - Gilruth, von Braun etc. One or two of them made their way into debriefings or other documents. Farouk El-Baz tried to extend it later with 'Arabia' for a big old basin discovered in Apollo images, to no avail.

I found a map with these names in the library at LPI, so it's in the book. By the time of Apollo 10 this scheme was replaced with numbers for craters and roman numerals for basins. Apollo 10 had its own set of names for features on the descent track towards the Apollo 11 landing site. I found the hand-annotated copy of the Apollo 10 descent monitoring chart with those names too.

Phil

Here's a somewhat off-topic question: How, exactly, would y'all preserve the Apollo 11 landing site (or, if possible, all of the Apollo landing sites) and still allow people to visit and see them?

You can set up cordons around the equipment -- the descent stage, the EASEP or ALSEP experiments, etc., and let people walk up fairly close to them. But how do you preserve the footprints in the soil?

I've thought of any number of things, from elevated plexiglass flooring laid atop the original surface, to some kind of plastic that can be applied directly onto the original surface but which does not deform the most subtle patterns in it... and each has its own (possibly insurmountable, pardon the pun) problems.

I'd hate to have to make people look at these historic sites through drop-a-quarter telescopes from a couple of km away. But I think you have to preserve the footprints and such. So, what are y'all's ideas?

-the other Doug

I hope we reach the point where this becomes a real issue in my lifetime! I doubt it though.