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... The Red Planet itself has gone through several names. The Egyptians called it Har Decher, the Red One. The Babylonians referred to it as Nergal, the Star of Death. The Romans called it Mars, after their god of war.
A single name sufficed for thousands of years, but that began to change in the 19th century, when better telescopes allowed scientists to see more detailed features of the planet.
Astronomers Giovanni Schiaparelli and Eugene Antoniadi produced the first detailed maps of Mars, with about 100 names for what they thought were seas, continents, polar ice caps and canals or channels crisscrossing the surface.
The names, mostly drawn from the Bible, myths and classical locations, were used until the 1960s, when NASA's Mariner missions swooped by.
The detail from Mariner's cameras forced the International Astronomical Union to come up with an official Martian naming system.
The union decided that large craters would be named after deceased scientists or writers who had contributed to the lore of Mars, such as Schiaparelli and author H.G. Wells. Small craters would be named after towns and villages with populations of fewer than 100,000 people. Large valleys would be named using the word for Mars in various languages; small valleys would be named after rivers. Nothing smaller than 330 feet would get an official name unless it had exceptional scientific interest.
The arrival of the Mars rovers has overloaded the system. With the ability to look close and far with incredible detail, the two robots have forced scientists to churn out names like a sweatshop factory.
Some of the names, like Columbia Hills — after the ill-fated space shuttle that was destroyed as it reentered Earth's atmosphere in 2003 — have deep meaning in the history of space exploration. Others sound like they were named by exhausted scientists whose children watch a lot of cartoons.
Schiaperelli and Antoniadi "would probably be appalled" by the hodgepodge, said Smith, who has been involved with the astronomical union's Mars naming group for more than three decades.
The first days of the rover missions went smoothly enough.
Spirit was the first to touch down and, after getting settled, it snapped a picture of a nearby 30-foot crater that the mission's principal investigator dubbed Sleepy Hollow, after the long hours the mission team had been working.
Two prominent rocks were named Adirondack, for the mountain range in New York state, and Sashimi, because of the rock's salmon color.
Spirit's twin, Opportunity, landed three weeks later on the other side of the planet in Meridiani Planum.
Since everyone at JPL was raiding a freezer of ice cream at the time, Opportunity's controllers took their cue from their stomachs. That's why there is an area of round and chunky pebbles named Cookies N Cream and a lighter patch of soil named Vanilla.
Earlier this year, a pockmarked meteorite in Opportunity's path was named SpongeBob SquarePants. Scientists had to name a spot on the rock and came up with SpongeBob's best friend, Patrick.