Few things are as engaging or beautiful in the night sky as a full moon. Next time you gaze up, consider a word (acronym, really, with the strength of a word in some circles) well known to scientists at NASA: KREEP. KREEP stands for the group of elements found in a sample (along with samples collected from many other missions) retrieved by the Apollo program almost exactly 43 years ago this week: K stands for potassium, REE for Rare Earth Elements and P for phosphorous. Of all the lunar soil samples returned to earth (841 pounds worth!) the KREEP samples were particularly important to scientists as the combination of elements rarely occurs outside of a molten state. The KREEP sample furthered knowledge of the early formation of both Earth and the Moon, and remains a significant milestone in the understanding of Earth and lunar geology.

Image courtesy Luc Viatour / www.Lucnix.be

This blog has been dedicated for over a year to telling the stories of words and word origins in science. Science (along with math, technology and engineering) is a rich field for etymologists, as the discoveries of science and the creation of new words almost always have a great back story to go with the word.

Today, however, is your chance to help create a science word, by naming the two newest moons of Pluto: currently known as P4 and P5. First the current names:

Pluto is the Roman name for the Greek god Hades, master of the underworld. The underworld was the place where the souls of the departed go after they die. After Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto from the Lowell Observatory in 1930, a little girl named Venetia Burney from Oxford, England suggested that he name it “Pluto”. Tombaugh liked the idea, in part because the initial letters “PL” reminded him of Percival Lowell, namesake for the obsevatory and the first to propose the existence of a “Planet X”.

Charon is the name of Pluto’s largest and innermost moon. It was discovered in 1978 by James Christy. In mythology, Charon was the boatsman who ferried the souls of the dead across the river Styx into the underworld.

Nix and Hydra are the names of Pluto’s next two moons, discovered in 2005 in Hubble telescope images by a team of astronomers led by Hal Weaver and Alan Stern. Nix is the goddess of the night and Hydra is the name of the many-headed monster who guarded one of entrances to the underworld. These names, with initials “NH”, were chosen to match the initials of New Horizons, the NASA spacecraft now on its way to Pluto.

Here is a little bit of background on the names that currently appear on the ballot for the new moons:

Acheron: One of the five rivers of the underworld, symbolizing pain.

Alecto: One of the furies, hideous snake-haired monsters who were servants of Hades. It was the job of Alecto to punish mortals for their crimes of anger.

Cerberus/Kerberos: The three-headed dog who guards the gates to the underworld, preventing the the dead from escaping.

Erebus: A primordial god and the personification of darkness. With Nyx, he fathered many children including Hypnos and Styx.

Eurydice: The wife of Orpheus, for whom he entered the underworld. During their journey home, Orpheus violated his agreement with Persephone not to look back, and Eurydice was lost forever.

Heracles/Hercules: The heroic demigod who slew the Hydra, entered the underworld and who also carried Cerberus back. He is one of very few who ever returned from the underworld.

Hypnos: A son of Nyx and the personification of sleep.

Lethe: One of the five rivers of the underworld, symbolizing oblivion. It flows through the cave of Hypnos and merges with the river Styx.

Obol/Obolus: The coin paid to Charon in order to obtain passage across the river Styx.
Orpheus/Orfeus: A gifted musician who entered the underworld to retrieve his wife Eurydice. He charmed Hades and Persephone with his music, and became the only mortal ever to return from the underworld.

Persephone/Proserpina: A goddess kidnapped by Hades to become the queen of the underworld. She is the symbolizes vegetation and rebirth.

Styx: The river that separates Earth from the underworld. This name also refers to the goddess of the river Styx, daughter of Nyx and Erebus.

You can vote here: www.plutorocks.com

Special thanks to www.space.com and www.plutorocks.com for this content.

In 1772, German astronomer Johann Elert Bode noticed that the arrangement of planets in the solar system was not quite what he expected, and proposed that there was an undiscovered planet somewhere between Mars and Jupiter. Herschel’s discovery of Uranus in 1782 only confirmed his hypothesis, an he and several other astronomers looked for two decades before deciding that an organized effort was needed. They formed a commission in the year 1800 headed by Hungarian astronomer Baron Franz Xaver von Zach, who selected 24 promising astronomers to begin the search. Among the astromers selected, a letter went out to Italian astonomer Guiseppe Piazzi, who discovered Ceres on January 1, 1801, before his letter arrived and before the search began in earnest! Not sure what he was seeing, he described it after several days as a comet. Ceres was exactly where (meaning distance from the sun) scientists expected it to be. Piazzi observed Ceres 24 times over a period of two months before illness caused him to cease observation. He announced his discovery on the 24 of January 1801, but the new discovery was soon occluded by the sun, and was not ‘rediscovered’ until 24 year old math phenom Carl Freidrich Gauss came up with an accurate method of predicting its location, and Ceres was seen again almost exactly a year later on 31 December 1801.

Since then, Ceres has been known as a nova, the Latin word for new which had long been used for new objects in the sky that have not yet been classified, an asteroid (a word coined by William Herschel to describe Ceres, and later as a dwarf planet and even plutoid. There is still debate today on how to classify Ceres-scientists are studying its shape, size and orbit to determine its best classification. The name Ceres was proposed by Piazzi as Cerere Ferdinandea, Cerere being the Italian for Ceres, and Ferdinandea in homage to the King of Sicily, King Ferdinand III.

Image of Ceres courtesy NASA/Hubble, in the public domain.

400 years ago today, a great arms race was underway in the scientific community:  using the newly developed technology afforded by the telescope, astronomers and natural scientists stayed up night after night training their new instruments on the sky.  Few were as prolific or as careful (or talented) as Galileo Galilei who 400 years ago today, 28 December 1612 first saw the planet Neptune through a telescope.  Galileo noted the object but failed to recognize its significance, and Neptune disappeared for another 234 years, when it was predicted by French astronomer Urbain LeVerrier. A second arms race began when English, French and German scientists all raced to find the planet predicted by the perturbations in Uranus’ orbit.  The prediction was soon confirmed by German astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle just one year after he finished his Ph.d dissertation which he had sent to LeVerrier for comments.  Galle found Neptune first, though James Challis had both spotted it and noted it but failed to recognize it as a planet due to using outdated star maps.  A minor battle then ensued when LeVerrier suggested the name Leverrier for the new planet-and had English astronomers immediately insist that the recently discovered Uranus be named Herschel after its discoverer, the Anglo German astonomer William Herschel, who for his part wanted to call Uranus after his patron King George III of England.  Galle first proposed Janus (the Roman two-faced god) and Challis proposed Oceanus.  Ultimately consensus was found by continuing with the theme of naming planets after Greek and Roman gods, as the west had done since antiquity, and the planet was named Neptune.  Irregularities in Neptune’s orbit led to a third race to discover any satellites that might be orbiting, and soon enough Neptune’s first moon was discovered.

Image of Neptune and the Great Dark Spot courtesy NASA, in the public domain.

Today is the 45th anniversary of the first Saturn V test flight.  The naming history is complicated, so a quote from NASA’s history page:  

Evolution of nomenclature for the Saturn family of launch vehicles was one of the most complex of all NASA-associated names. On 15 August 1958 the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) approved initial work on a multistage launch vehicle with clustered engines in a 6.7-million-newton-thrust (1.5-million-pound-thrust) first stage. Conceived by designers at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA), the vehicle was unofficially known as “Juno V.” (Juno III and Juno IV were concepts for space vehicles to follow Juno II but were not built.) ¹

In October 1958 Dr. Wernher von Braun, the Director of ABMA’s Development Operations Division, proposed the Juno V be renamed Saturn and on 3 February 1959 ARPA officially approved the name change. The name Saturn was significant for three reasons: the planet Saturn appeared brighter than a first-magnitude star, so the association of this name with such a powerful new booster seemed appropriate; Saturn was the next planet after Jupiter, so the progression was analogous to ABMA’s progression from missile and space systems called “Jupiter”; and Saturn was the name of an ancient Roman god, so the name was in keeping with the U.S. military’s custom of naming missiles after mythological gods and heroes.

Image of all Saturn V launches courtesy of NASA, image in the public domain.