Tenzing ascends a Pluto peak

G.S. Mathur, TT, New Delhi, Sept. 7: Two mountain ranges on the surface of distant Pluto have been named Tenzing Montes and Hillary Montes to honour Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary, the first men known to summit Mount Everest.

The International Astronomical Union (IAU) today announced the names it had assigned to 14 geological features on the surface of Pluto, mapped through a close flyby of the planet by America's New Horizons spacecraft in July 2015.

The names pay homage to underworld mythology, literature, pioneering space missions, historic explorers, and scientists and engineers associated with Pluto and the Kuiper belt, the disc-shaped region of icy bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune.

"We're very excited to approve names recognising people of significance to Pluto and the pursuit of exploration as well as mythology and the underworld," Rita Schulz, chair of the IAU Working Group for Planetary Nomenclature, said in a news release.

The 14 geological features on the surface of Pluto that have been assigned names. Tenzing Montes and Hillary Montes are circled. Picture credit: International Astronomical Union (IAU)

The panel picked from sets of names proposed by Nasa's New Horizons team and members of the public. Among the geological features assigned official names are the Tombaugh Regio to honour Clyde Tombaugh, the US astronomer who discovered Pluto in 1930.

The Burney crater honours Venetia Burney (1918-2009), who as an 11-year-old schoolgirl suggested the name "Pluto" for Tombaugh's newly discovered planet. Burney later taught mathematics and economics.

A large plain, Sputnik Planitia, is named after Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, launched by the Soviet Union in 1957.

A mount named Al-Idrisi honours Ash-Sharif al-Idrisi, a 12<+>th<+>-century Arab mapmaker and geographer whose landmark work in medieval geography is sometimes translated as "The Pleasure of Him Who Longs to Cross the Horizons".

The Djanggawul Fossae define a network of long, narrow depressions named after the Djanggawuls, three ancestral beings in indigenous Australian mythology who travelled between the island of the dead and Australia, creating the landscape and filling it with vegetation.

The Sleipnir Fossa is named after the powerful, eight-legged horse of Norse mythology that carried the god Odin into the underworld.

The Virgil Fossae honour Virgil, one of the greatest Roman poets and Dante's fictional guide through hell and purgatory in The Divine Comedy.

The Adlivun Cavus is a deep depression named after Adlivun, the underworld in Inuit mythology.

The Hayabusa Terra is a large landmass saluting the Japanese spacecraft and mission (2003-2010) that returned the first asteroid sample.

The Voyager Terra honours the pair of Nasa spacecraft, launched in 1977, that performed the first "grand tour" of all four giant planets. The Voyager spacecraft are now probing the boundary between the Sun and interstellar space.

The Tartarus Dorsa is a ridge named after Tartarus, the deepest, darkest pit of the underworld in Greek mythology.

The Elliot crater recognises James Elliot (1943-2011), an MIT researcher who pioneered the use of stellar occultations to study the solar system, leading to discoveries such as the rings of Uranus and the first detection of Pluto's thin atmosphere.

Occultations are events marked by an object being hidden from view by the passage of another in front of it.