Mount Marilyn: A Name That Will Stick...Finally

Apollo 10 photograph taken from the Lunar Module "Snoopy" showing the Command Module "Charlie Brown" with Mt. Marilyn in the background (north is to the left, scene is 80 km wide). (Credit: LROC) In 1968, Jim Lovell became the first human to pilot a spacecraft — Apollo 8 — around another world. And two years later, his Apollo 13 heroics earned him an eternal place in spaceflight history. But those feats also left Lovell as the only person to visit the moon twice but never walk its surface. In July, Lovell got his chance to leave a lasting mark on our satellite. Explorers have always named newly discovered landmarks. But things didn’t work out that way for Apollo astronauts — at least until 2017. His wife’s name is now immortalized in Mount Marilyn, ending a years-long effort to recognize its place in lunar history. NASA’s astronauts put informal names on lunar features that could help them navigate. And those names ended up on maps and historical documents of the era. Some 82 Apollo-era names, like Tranquility Base, were made official before 1973. But for the last 45 years, astronomy’s official nomenclature group, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) — known for dethroning Pluto — wouldn’t make new astronaut-chosen names official. That means dozens of astronaut-named features don’t appear on official moon maps. That hasn’t made astronauts happy.