Moon Discovered Around Our Solar System's Tenth Planet

[Malenfant]

All of the names used by the MER teams, from the Columbia Hills to the names given to specific rocks, are not official, and are used only for easy reference, both on the team and when dealing with the public. Sure, they stick (and in some instances I think should be made official), but I doubt that any official names will ever be given to them.

I was thinking more along the lines of colonists just naming features as they please. A mountain near a landing site on an alien world might technically be called Mons Astronomica or something, but people living there probably wouldn't bother with that and call it "Lookout Mountain" or something.

Heck, even if people colonise Mars, will they really call things 'Mons this' or 'Fossae that' or 'Sinus blah'?

[Jorge]

I could almost see the IAU taking so long to decide on an official name (or ending up with a name that is in such an obscure language that nobody can pronounce it) that in popular parlance the Xena/Gabrielle names would stick anyway...

Problem with that, of course, is that what's an obscure language for you is a thing of dayly communication for somebody else. Personally, I think astronomical names should be a lot less "anglo-saxonized", "latinized" and "greekized" than they are now. There are a lot of people that hate the name Quaoar, for instance, but I think it's great. Instead of the umptieth obscure character from greek or roman mythology or one of Shakespeare's plays, we get a genuine and unmistakable indian god (or godlike force - I don't pretend to understand anything about this tongva myth - it "dances the gods into existence"? Wha?!). Sometimes it's hard to remember how it's written, but at least you won't mistake it with anything else.

On the other hand, my language is grossly under-represented in celestial nomenclature. Portuguese is 7th in the list of the world's major languages, and yet names with portuguese origins are very rare up there.

A Jorge asteroid would make a nice addition!

(besides, it's written the same in spanish - the 4th world language)

[Jorge]

Yeah, it sounds liek, somehow, there are two entries in your directory for Io. Possibly the result of some sort of add-on that you installed?

Yes, the second Io came in with the asteroid_IMPS_50km.ssc file, which includes almost all ateroidal bodies larger than 50 km in radius (don't remember what kind of radius we're talking about here. Probably average)

And Io is not the only case. There's also an asteroid Dione, for instance. One way to remedy this would be to add to the asteroids' names some sort of qualificatives. I don't think asteroid names do the trick: nobody ever remembers them ("Hum... ASCII is number 3568, 3566 or 3586? Hummm...").

[PlutonianEmpire]

Well, apparently they can't call Planet 10 "Persephone" because there's already a main belt asteroid with that name.

Nooooooooo!!!!!!!

lol