Date: November 12, 2010
Title: Mercury is for Art Lovers
Podcaster: Bob Hirshon
Organization: American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) www.aaas.org
Description: Where can you find Picasso, Stravinsky and Mark Twain all together—aside from the Smithsonian? On the surface of the planet Mercury. The International Astronomical Union decreed that all craters on the planet should be named for notable artists, musicians and writers. Bob Hirshon spoke with planetary geologist David Blewett, a scientist working on the MESSENGER mission to planet Mercury, about how scientists are matching famous names to craters and other land forms.
Bio: Bob Hirshon is Senior Project Director at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and host of the daily radio show and podcast Science Update. Now in its 23rd year, Science Update is heard on over 300 commercial stations nationwide. Hirshon also heads up Kinetic City, including the Peabody Award winning children’s radio drama, McGraw-Hill book series and Codie Award winning website and education program. He oversees the Science NetLinks project for K-12 science teachers, part of the Verizon Foundation Thinkfinity partnership. Hirshon is a Computerworld/ Smithsonian Hero for a New Millennium laureate.
Today’s sponsor: This episode of “365 Days of Astronomy” is sponsored by the Education and Outreach team for the MESSENGER mission to planet Mercury. Follow the mission as the spacecraft helps to unlock the secrets of the inner solar system at www.messenger-education.org.
Transcript:
Mercury is For Art Lovers
Hirshon:
Welcome to the 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast. I’m Bob Hirshon, host of the AAAS radio show and podcast Science Update. This haunting composition was composed by Miyan Tansen, a classical Hindustani composer who lived in the early 16th century. And I would never have heard of him had it not been for the planet Mercury. The International Astronomical Union, or IAU, decreed that all craters on Mercury be given the names of notable artists, writers and composers. Tansen is a crater 34 kilometers in diameter, located a few kilometers north of Polygnotus—a crater named for the ancient Greek painter.
David Blewett is a planetary geologist at the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University, and part of the MESSENGER spacecraft science team. MESSENGER was built at the Applied Physics Lab and is scheduled to go into orbit around Mercury in March 2011. Blewett says the IAU oversees the naming of all planetary geological features, guided by a simple set of rules.
Blewett:
The rules go something like this: The feature has to have a name that is not associated with a military, political or religious figure, the person has to have been dead for at least three years, and generally speaking their work has to have been recognized as significant for at least 50 years.
Hirshon:
In addition, he says the IAU comes up with themes for different bodies.
Blewett:
On the moon the craters are named after scientists and philosophers, I guess; on Mercury it’s artists and musicians; on Venus it’s prominent women. So there’s an adopted theme like that for each of the bodies.
Hirshon:
That’s just for craters. Other features get their own themes.
Blewett:
For instance, on Mercury, rupes, that’s a Latin word that means cliff and it’s a geological term for these large cliffs that we see on Mercury. And the theme for those is Ships of Discovery. So many of the ships from the age of exploration, there are rupes with that name. And the MESSENGER project, we proposed the name Beagle Rupes, for one of the large new cliff features that was discovered through MESSENGER imaging, named of course for the ship that Charles Darwin voyaged on, The Beagle.
Hirshon:
The IAU has a list of approved names that they’ve built up over the years, but MESSENGER team scientists can also suggest their own—especially if there’s a good reason to give a particular name to a feature.
Blewett:
For example, one of the neat features we saw from the first MESSENGER flyby of MESSENGER was a group of craters that had very dark material forming their rims. And sometimes we like to give a name that somehow has a link to the feature somehow. So we named one of those dark rimmed craters after Edgar Allen Poe. Poe of course is famous for his rather dark macabre tales. And of course he lived here in the Baltimore area, so the mission MESSENGER spacecraft was built at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab which is in Baltimore, and the PI is in Washington, so there is a connection with the Baltimore Washington area for that crater.
Hirshon:
Similarly, the MESSENGER science team found a crater that had extreme color variations, and that inspired one of the scientists who happens to have an art history background.
Blewett:
And he knew that this painter, French painter Derain, was known for his kind of wild, at the time thought to be scandalous use of color in his paintings. And so we thought that that was a good name for this crater which has, as I said, extreme color variations.
Hirshon:
But not all the names come from mission scientists. An amateur astronomer named Ron Dantowitz got viewing time on the Wilson Observatory telescope in 1998 and got 40,000 analog images of Mercury. He digitized them and then painstakingly culled down to the best 40 images. Then, using off the shelf software, he combined them and performed image enhancement. He wound up with an image that showed details of the planet never seen before, including surface features that weren’t imaged by Mariner 10—at the time, the only spacecraft to have visited the planet. There was a particularly bright spot that Dantowitz thought should be named Copland, after Aaron Copland, the composer of Fanfare for the Common Man. He thought it was an appropriate name for a feature that was discovered by an elementary school science teacher using common, off the shelf equipment and software. Blewett says Dantowitz sent the suggestion to the IAU.
Blewett:
Well, on one of the, I think the second MESSENGER flyby, the spacecraft actually imaged that part of the planet so we got an picture of this bright spot that Ron Dantzowitz had taken pictures of from the earth. Interestingly, it turned out that that bright spot wasn’t an impact crater, but instead it was a deposit of very bright material that we think came from an explosive volcanic eruption, what we call a pyroclastic eruption. So we don’t have a theme yet, or a type of name on Mercury of what to call these volcanic features. So I contacted Mr. Dantowitz and I told him look we can’t name that bright spot you found Copland, but how about if I pick a big crater nearby and use the name Copland for that one? And he was agreeable and very pleased that we could propose that to the IAU and once again, they approved that name. So now there is a large degraded crater nearby to that feature that is called Copland.
Hirshon:
So far, there are nearly 300 named craters on Mercury. But soon, that number will go way up, because in March, the MESSENGER spacecraft will go into orbit around the planet.
Blewett:
It’s going to start systematically mapping the planet and at that point we’ll have a big influx of data, better quality data, high resolution, and so we’ll get an even better look at the surface and we can start looking at new features and coming to appreciate features we’ve seen before as to which ones are really the most interesting and can tell us the most about the planet’s geological history. So we’ll be working away to assign names at that point.
Hirshon:
Fortunately, much of the groundwork has been done for them, partly through the work of two high school interns—now college students. Kathryn Powell and Pegah Pashai were summer intern students at the Applied Physics Lab. Blewett says they helped come up with names for geological features, put together a list of prominent and important features that might need names, and helped write the proposals submitted to the IAU.
Blewett:
I met one of the girls’ parents when she brought them through the lab and I said you know these names that your daughter picked are going to be there forever. 200 years from now, 10,000 years from now, those are the names that are used for the features on Mercury.
Hirshon:
To learn more about the craters and other surface features of Mercury, visit the MESSENGER education website at messenger-education.org. For the 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast, I’m Bob Hirshon.
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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