[X] My Assistant

[centsworth_II]

...there's a perfectly good pair of generic terms... apoapsis... periapsis - where we refer to the point on the orbit, not the body underneath it.

Yay!!! Let's hope the writers of Dawn papers don't try to invent new terms.

Just don't put Marc Rayman of Dawn Journal fame in charge of official Dawn terminology.

Some of his latest coinages:
Dawniabilities
Dawnthropoids
Dawnthorities
Adawnherents

[Greg Hullender]

This is because the proper adjectival form would be 'Venereal', which is not used for obvious reasons. The adjectival form for Venus was an open question for a while -- 'Venerian' and 'Cytherean' (the latter formed from Cytherea, one of Aphrodite's other names/epithets) are often found in older works -- but eventually the grating and uneuphonious, but simple, 'Venusian' was settled on.

In the same way 'Martial' was preoccupied in English, so the adjective for the planet Mars is instead 'Martian'.

You have confused astronomy with astrology.

The -al derivations (on the Latin Genitive) correspond to attributes associated with the astrological influence of the planet. Hence we have mercurial, venereal, martial, and jovial, (but saturnine, not saturnal) and we don't have uranal, neptunal, or cereal. (Not with those meanings, anyway.) ;-)

The -an derivations (also from the Latin Genitive) refer to properties of the planet itself, as I said earlier. To argue otherwise, you have to claim that ALL of the adjectives for the planets are "preoccupied" somehow, and this is clearly absurd.

--Greg