[meteorite-list] NASA Extends Campaign for Public to Name Features on Pluto

[Ron Baalke]

April 6, 2015
     
NASA Extends Campaign for Public to Name Features on Pluto

The public has until Friday, April 24 to help name new features on Pluto and 
its orbiting satellites as they are discovered by NASA's New Horizons 
mission.

Announced in March, the agency wants to give the worldwide public more time 
to participate in the agency's mission to Pluto that will make the 
first-ever close flyby of the dwarf planet on July 14.

The campaign extension, in partnership with the International Astronomical 
Union (IAU) in Paris, was due to the overwhelming response from the public.

"Due to increasing interest and the number of submissions we're getting, 
it was clear we needed to extend this public outreach activity," said Jim 
Green, director of NASA's Planetary Science Division at the agency's 
headquarters in Washington. "This campaign not only reveals the public's 
excitement about the mission, but helps the team, which will not have time to 
come up with names during the flyby, to have a ready-made library of names in 
advance to officially submit to the IAU."

The IAU is the formal authority for naming celestial bodies. Submissions must 
follow a set of accepted themes and guidelines set out by the IAU's Working 
Group for Planetary System Nomenclature. After the campaign concludes, 
NASA's New Horizons team will sort through the names and submit its 
recommendations to the IAU. The IAU will decide whether and how the names 
will be used.

The campaign allows the public of all ages to submit names for the many new 
features scientists expect to discover on Pluto following the encounter.

"I'm impressed with the more than 40,000 thoughtful submissions," said 
Mark Showalter, scientist New Horizons science team co-investigator, and SETI 
Institute in Mountain View, California, which is hosting the naming website. 
"Every day brings new lessons in the world's history, literature and 
mythology. Participation has come from nearly every country on Earth, so this 
really is a worldwide campaign."

New Horizons already has covered more than 3 billion miles since it launched 
on Jan. 19, 2006. Its journey has taken it past each planet's orbit, from 
Mars to Neptune, in record time, and now it's now in the first stage of an 
historic encounter with Pluto that includes long-distance imaging, as well as 
dust, energetic particle and solar wind measurements to characterize the 
space environment near Pluto.

The spacecraft will pass Pluto at a speed of 31,000 mph taking thousands of 
images and making a wide range of science observations. At a distance of 
nearly 4 billion miles from Earth at flyby, it will take approximately 4.5 
hours for data to reach Earth.

The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) manages the New Horizons 
mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Alan Stern, 
of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), is the principal investigator. 
SwRI leads the science team, payload operations and encounter science 
planning. New Horizons is part of the New Frontiers Program, managed by 
NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. APL designed, 
built and operates the spacecraft for NASA.

To find out more information about how to participate in the Pluto naming 
contest, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/newhorizons 

Detailed IAU guidelines for acceptable names submissions are available online 
at:

http://www.iau.org/public/themes/naming/#dwarfplanets 

For images and updates on the July 14 Pluto flyby, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/newhorizons

and

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu

-end-

Dwayne Brown
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1726
dwayne.c.brown at nasa.gov 

Lars Lindberg Christensen
IAU Press Officer
Garching bei Munchen, Germany
+49 89 320 06 761, cell: +49 173 38 72 621
lars at eso.org