Space scientists, with the public's help, have been naming features on Pluto and its moons after deities of the underworld.
The dark spot near the north pole of Pluto's largest moon, Charon, is called Mordor, for example. Mordor, as J.R.R. Tolkien fans know, is a region occupied by Sauron, in Middle Earth. A massive, frightening volcano in Mordor was a location involved in the quest to destroy the ring in the novel and film, Fellowship of the Ring.
In April, NASA put out a call to the public for names in order to assign informal designations to new landforms discovered during New Horizons' historic Pluto flyby on July 14.
Mountains on Pluto! This movie zooms into the base of the heart-shaped feature on Pluto to highlight a new image captured by our New Horizons spacecraft. The new image, seen in black and white against a previously released color image of Pluto, shows a mountain range with peaks jutting as high as high as 11,000 feet (3,500 meters) above the surface of the icy body. Image credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI nasa #pluto #plutoflyby #newhorizons#solarsystem #nasabeyond #science A video posted by NASA (@nasa) on Jul 15, 2015 at 1:06pm PDT
"When NASA's New Horizons spacecraft flies by Pluto this July, the spacecraft's high-resolution cameras will spot many new landforms on the dwarf planet's unexplored surface. They are all going to need names — and NASA wants you to help," the agency said.
According to official rules of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) -- the governing body that assigns official scientific monikers to planets and other solar system bodies -- land features on Charon will be named after "destinations and milestones of fictional space and other exploration," among other things.
FFeatures on Pluto itself, however, will earn monikers from the underworld, picked from among the world’s mythologies, including gods, goddesses and dwarfs associated with the underworld.
The informal name given to one of the dark regions near Pluto's south pole was initially named "the whale" when scientists first spotted it this week, but now is informally called Cthulhu, which is a frightening-looking deity of the underworld that was created by the writer H.P. Lovecraft.
Other features on Pluto have been informally named Balrog, which is a demon from the Lord of the Rings series, Meng-p’o, which is the Buddhist goddess of forgetfulness and amnesia, and Mayan death gods such as Vucub-Came and Hun-Came.
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In addition, another land feature is known as Krun, named after an overlord of the Underworld in the Mandaean faith. According to the Our Pluto website, which was the venue for public voting on Pluto names, the Mandaeans are "the last surviving Gnostic group from late antiquity."
The names may be mysterious and noteworthy, but they also serve a scientific purpose by helping scientists refer to features without resorting to convoluted references such as "the dark spot to the right of that bright spot near that whale-like feature near the bright spot," which is probably where space scientists were headed without the names.
In order for the names to be formally assigned, NASA would have to present them to the IAU for approval. As new land features are revealed by the hundreds, or even thousands, of high-resolution images yet to be transmitted and processed from the spacecraft, more mythological and underworld names may be used. These included Anubis, from Egyptian mythology and Yama, which is the judge of the dead in East Asian mythology.
In a blog post, Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin wrote his approval of the science fiction names making it to Pluto and its moons.
"Mordor is on Pluto! Who knew?" Martin said. "Okay, got to admit, I think it is really cool that some of the features New Horizons is finding on Pluto (our ninth planet, dammit!!!) and its moon Charon are being named Mordor and Cthulhu. Who says science fiction and fantasy haven't arrived?"
"J.R.R. Tolkien and H.P. Lovecraft have entered realms previously reserved for Greek and Roman gods."
One does not simply fly 3 billion miles to take a photo of Mordor, the dark spot on top of Pluto's moon Charon. #PlutoFlyBy (via @NASA) A photo posted by The White House (@whitehouse) on Jul 15, 2015 at 6:02pm PDT