(The IAU, of course, famously reclassified Pluto from "planet" to "dwarf planet" back in 2006.) Vader Crater, Sputnik Planum, Nostromo Chasma and all the other appellations remain provisional until the IAU has approved them. The New Horizons team chose its favorites from this large database and submitted them to the IAU, which assigns "official" names to celestial bodies and their features. People around the world suggested tens of thousands of names via the Our Pluto project during its March-April run, New Horizons team members have said.
The New Horizons team selected all of these monikers with help from the public - specifically, the "Our Pluto" campaign, a joint project involving NASA, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) and the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute in Mountain View, California. Famed French oceanographer Jacques Cousteau's name now graces a Pluto cliff, and the dwarf planet's two known mountain ranges are named after Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, who, in 1953, became the first people ever to summit Mount Everest, Earth's tallest mountain. The New Horizons team is not just recognizing space exploration, either. Other parts of the heart are named after the space shuttles Challenger and Columbia, which were lost in 19, respectively, resulting in the death of 14 astronauts. The large, icy plain within Tombaugh Regio ("Tombaugh Region") is called Sputnik Planum, after the famous Soviet satellite whose 1957 launch marked the birth of the space age. Other parts of Pluto are named after pioneering space missions, including NASA's Viking, Pioneer and Voyager efforts the Soviet Union's Venus-studying Venera program and Hayabusa, a Japanese mission that returned pieces of an asteroid to Earth in 2010. (Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute)įor instance, Pluto's famous "heart" is named after Clyde Tombaugh, the American astronomer who discovered the dwarf planet in 1930.
These monikers have not yet been approved by the International Astronomical Union (IAU). Image showing the informal names being used by the New Horizons team for features on the icy Pluto plains known as Sputnik Planum.
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