Listen to this episode and find more information about the topics therein at theallusionist.org/craters
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, sell language a monorail.
In this episode, we’re headed to the planet Mercury. Bring a packed lunch and your strongest sunscreen.
And on the subject of space, I’m excited to say that there’ll be a live space-themed Allusionist performance on 18th April in the planetarium at the H. R. MacMillan space centre in Vancouver BC! I have wanted to do a show in a planetarium for so long, and your ticket includes not just a delightful dose of celestial Allusionist as you watch nebulae swirling over your head, but also a talk by astronomer Marley Leacock about space words like ‘spaghettification’, AND you get to see all the space centre’s exhibits and science demonstrations. Tickets are on sale now; I’ve linked to them at theallusionist.org/events, early bird pricing until 28 March.
Content note: this episode contains mentions of, but not descriptions of, sexual violence.
On with the show.
ANNIE LENNOX: It really all came to light when I got the opportunity to name my first feature on Mercury - which was, side note, one of the most exciting things. To find something that is scientifically significant and then to get the chance to name it on another planet: super cool.
HZ: Very!
ANNIE LENNOX: You can't just go about naming anything you want nilly willy. You have to find something that has some sort of scientific significance.
I'm Annie Lennox; I'm a third year PhD student with The Open University. My background is in terrestrial geology, so Earth-based stuff. But with my PhD, I found myself more moving into planetary geology, specifically the planet Mercury. My project involves mapping the southern quadrangle of Mercury - Mercury is split into these fifteen quadrangles, and mine is H15, down in the south. And alongside the mapping, I have some interest in interesting craters that formed all across Mercury, with interesting ejecta patterns, and also volcanology, specifically small scale effusive volcanology.
HZ: While mapping the H15 quadrangle, in 2022, Annie discovered a crater that had not been logged before - the images she and the research team were working from were the first capturing that region of Mercury in sunlight. Because she had been the one to discover the crater, Annie got to name it.
ANNIE LENNOX: So I was so excited by that opportunity. I really wanted to name my first real discovery, after a woman, particularly a Scottish women, just so I felt that there was a little bit of representation for me up there. I thought that would be really kind of cool.
HZ: There is an organisation that decides whether a space discovery is deserving of a name and, if it is, which names will be allowed.
ANNIE LENNOX: It's the International Astronomical Union, the IAU. They are an organisation that deal with name requests. They either accept or reject them. So you appeal to them first of all and say, “This thing that I found, does it deserve a name?” And then they'll come back saying yes or no. And at that point you can suggest a name. But ultimately, if the IAU don't like your suggestion, they can just pick their own name. Which nearly it happened with my first naming experience. My first couple of suggestions weren't actually accepted.
HZ: The IAU sets conventions after which things can be named.
ANNIE LENNOX: Those conventions are a set of rules that dictate the kind of themes that you can name things on all planets. So there's different conventions, be it on the moon or on Mars, or as I was looking in on Mercury.
HZ: There are conventions for each of the different kinds of features on the surface of each planet and moon and planetoid and so on. For example, craters on Jupiter’s moon Europa are named after Celtic mythical figures; craters on the planetoid Ceres are named after agricultural deities, since the planetoid itself is too; on Mercury, faculae or bright spots are named after different languages’ word for ‘snake’. On Mars, small craters are named after towns on Earth with populations under 100,000, and craters larger than 50km across are named after writers and scientists who did significant work about Mars. The IAU was founded in 1919, but some of the conventions had already been going for hundreds of years - in the mid-1600s, Italian astronomer Giovanni Battista Riccioli started giving weather-related names to lunar areas like the Mare Tranquillitatis, the Sea of Tranquillity, and Oceanus Procellarum, the Ocean Of Storms; names that still stand. So some of the IAU’s systems are ones that they inherited.
ANNIE LENNOX: And they kind of had to either create conventions around those, or just having a few that don't really fit with the conventions. For a lot of features, and actually particularly craters, these get named after real people who have made real contributions and should be celebrated. Within that, some of them are named after scientists, some of them are named after artists. There's different careers of people. But it's always the case that that individual must have been historically significant for at least 50 years - so you're thinking about fifty years of kind of fame and recognition. And they must be deceased from three years.
So that's really one of the main issues I personally have with the conventions. If we are judging on things like historic recognition and fame and these kind of metrics, when we look back in history at who was allowed to achieve fame and recognition and status, that is not a diverse pool of people. It's unsurprising if we are going with the grain of that, that we end up having quite over representation of cis white men, and lacking in pretty much all other forms of diversity. And so with the whole naming process, it really brought to my attention some clear issues in terms of gender diversity, yes, but really all sorts of diversity and balances across the solar system.
I was very much brought to it through the light of there not being good representation for women; but guaranteed as soon as women are missing from the narrative, other forms of diversity are certainly also. But one of the main issues is that this has never been researched. They just kept naming things and not really, I think, considering about who they were naming these after. And so there's no real accountability or transparency of what's been named and how that reflects humanity and all the different types of people that we should be celebrating. And so I think part of the issue is that there's just kind of a lack of understanding about how bad this imbalance really is.
So the whole project has kind of sprung from that opportunity of getting to name things.
HZ: When naming the crater she discovered, Annie followed the IAU's naming convention for craters on Mercury, which is as follows: "Deceased artists, musicians, painters, and authors who have made outstanding or fundamental contributions to their field and have been recognized as art historically significant figures for more than 50 years.” So Annie suggested some women who fit that bill.
ANNIE LENNOX: I put forward one name, which was Sheila Stewart, who was a traveler and tradition-bearer. Her name wasn't accepted because there was already a different Stewart on the moon. And that's one of the issues, there's this kind of de facto male occupation of space where the men got there first and so they have their names and you can't have a woman who might share a last name represented also. So that got rejected. And then my second suggestion was Mary Brooksbank. I was like, “There's not going to be another Brooksbank. That's surely a safe name.” And right enough, there wasn't; but that also got rejected - that was on the basis of her being too politically significant. For a real person's name to be accepted, they cannot be politically, religiously or military significant figures. Now, they never define what they mean by religiously or politically significant, but Mary Brooksbank was considered too political because she had said many times that she was very communist and believed that the world should be a communist place, if not communist socialist, and lots of her songs and poems kind of reflected that.
Now that sparked a little bit of feminine rage in me, in that there was one crater on Mercury called the Neruda Crater, and actually a fifteenth of Mercury's globe was called the Neruda Quadrangle, so this person's very well represented. The origin of that name is Pablo Neruda, who was a Chilean poet. Now, he was also sat on the Communist Senate party. So I would argue that's fairly politically significant. Not only that, but he had self-written accounts of him committing rape and really other awful deeds. And so actually one little bit of action that's happened is that we brought this to the attention of the IAU, the International Astronomical Union, and they, with that information, changed the origin of that crater. So it is still called the Neruda Crater; what we did is we found another artist who also had the last name Neruda, and switched the origins, so it no longer reflects Pablo Neruda.
HZ: How open was the IAU to you renaming the Neruda Crater after a different Neruda? How much of a deal was that?
ANNIE LENNOX: Yeah, it was an interesting one. It had first been brought to their attention by my colleague, Ben Man, who was mapping the Neruda Quadrangle. And so he had emailed them ages back saying, "Do you realise that Neruda actually has this quite horrid history?" And at the time, they'd sent a response that was kind of like, "We do empathise with that, but we don't want to change the name because it's been called that for so long," and these kind of things.
HZ: Not that long; the crater was only named for Pablo Neruda in 2008, and the quadrangle even more recently than that. There are items on my mother's spice rack that went out of date before anything on Mercury was named for Pablo Neruda.
ANNIE LENNOX: It's not a great reason, and it was kind of put to bed for a while; but then the more involved I got with this whole equality and diversity naming issue, we kind of revisited it then and said, “Actually, this is something that really should change.” And once we'd found appropriate people to change the name to, they were actually quite open to it. And the way it got changed was actually quite quick. So I think you just have to know to prod the right places.
HZ: The Neruda crater is now officially named for the 18th century Czech composer Johann Baptist Neruda and the 19th century Czech poet and journalist Jan Neruda.
ANNIE LENNOX: Unfortunately, it still reflects a cis white man - but, you know, baby steps. But it's an upward battle.
HZ: Meanwhile, Annie’s search continued for a name that the IAU would approve for her crater.
ANNIE LENNOX: After those two initial rejections, I think they'd cottoned on that I'd wanted to name this after a woman. And they gave me this list of women, just kind of names plucked from a directory of women musicians. Which I just didn't like, because none of them meant anything to me, and I thought it was such low effort to just be like, “Okay, well just pick one from this dictionary,” you know? Yeah, that wasn't for me.
I ended up sending a list of, I think, ten other women, all of that whom I thought were super deserving of being represented. And I put that forward to the IAU and they said of those ten, two would be considered, so I picked my favourite of those two and that was Lady Carolina Nairne. It's known as the Nairne crater now. And she was a Scottish poet and songwriter - oh, she's an incredible person, but an awful lot of her poems were actually wrongly attributed to Robert Burns or other male poets at the time, and that's because she never published under her own name. It wasn't proper in her day for a lady to be a poet, and so she published most of her work under pseudonyms. And I think there's some real poetic justice that she didn't get the recognition that she deserved in her own time, but now she's represented on a whole other planet. I like that as a story. But I did feel like it was difficult to get that goal of naming this discovery after a woman.
HZ: This whole process of naming her first crater sent Annie on another voyage to unknown territory: gathering statistics of who the eponymous space features are named after.
ANNIE LENNOX: On Mars and the Moon, where for a real person's name to be represented, that person must have been a scientist, women feature just 2%, which is really pretty dire. It's not great at all.
HZ: Mercury is good in comparison. Though still not good. 88.4% of craters on Mercury are named after men.
ANNIE LENNOX: There was a massive over-representation of Europeans, unsurprisingly. And when we broke that down, it was mostly cis white Italian men that were represented.
HZ: How did they get all over Mercury's craters?
ANNIE LENNOX: I know, well, it's kind of unsurprising. The convention for craters on Mercury is to adopt the names of artists. And that's not just painters: it's authors, it's architects, it's choreographers, whatever you want - which, historically, is slightly less exclusionary than, for example, science. However, there was still only less than twelve percent of women who had craters named after them on Mercury. And I think twelve percent just irrefutably does not reflect all of women's contribution to the entire history of art. I just thought that was kind of outrageous.
To an extent, I kind of get it for, for example, the moon. The moon has been a target for exploration for hundreds of years; people have been looking at it forever, and they've been naming it for as long as they've been looking at it. And so part of the issue is a function of time: when we look back historically, the space sector was itself less diverse, and less inclined to name things after a diverse array of people. Mercury, to some extent, doesn't have that as an excuse. Mercury has only had two previous missions, the first being in the 1970s and then the second in 2015, that kind of age. So by then, diversity was a bit more at the forefront of the scientific community. And even then, there's still a massive imbalance. So it can't exclusively be a function of the time at which these things were identified or named.
HZ: There's one planet where all features have to be given women's names, and that's Venus - the only planet in our solar system named after a female deity not a male one.
ANNIE LENNOX: Oh yes, yes, that's a minefield. I suppose there's kind of an argument that perhaps gender parity at least is not needed on these planets, because us women have Venus, a planet where all things are supposed to be named after women. But: I think what's really crucial here is that the women on Venus do not have to be real.
HZ: Annie found that only 38% of the craters on Venus that are named have been named after a real person.
ANNIE LENNOX: Rather they have, the names of mythological characters who are more often celebrated, you know, for their beauty or their fertility or their sexuality rather than their contributions. Or, there's a massive proportion of craters that just have typically female first names - so there's an Abigail crater, there's a Lucy crater - these don't reflect any real woman who might have made real contributions to society. These are just arbitrary names, picked from the heavens, you know?
HZ: They’ve just gone into the baby names book and picked some white British names.
ANNIE LENNOX: Yeah! Yeah! It could be anyone. Exactly. Exactly. Which I think is ridiculous! You have all these other planets that massively celebrate the contributions of men. And on the one planet that's supposed to celebrate women, there aren't enough real women that fit those conventions that they've had to revert to these mythological characters or arbitrary names. And that's quite disappointing.
HZ: As Annie noted earlier, it’s not just gender which has a representational imbalance in space features. As well as being predominantly male, the eponyms skew white, European, and publicly cisgender and heterosexual.
ANNIE LENNOX: The work that I've done just myself ends up being quite gender-focused, and that is simply because even just considering that one form of diversity was so much work for one person; it meant going through hundreds of named - I focused on craters - going through hundreds of named craters and manually trying to work out the gender identity of that person, which, when you're talking about historical figures, it's not always that easy.
HZ: And Annie is just one person, and this is not even her job; this is what she has been working on while doing her PhD. So to try to quantify representation, or shortfalls thereof, in space science nomenclature, Annie has been running Planetary Science Hackathons, where volunteers research the people behind the space eponyms.
ANNIE LENNOX: The whole aim of these hackathons was to bring people together who were interested both in space science but also in how things were named, and find out exactly who was overrepresented, underrepresented and missing entirely from space science nomenclature. That wasn't limited to gender by any means. We looked into nationality first of all, by continent, and then also we're looking into country by country. It's quite a big undertaking going through every named feature in the whole solar system and trying to find out who that person was. Especially because so many historic people, we're trying to collect information on things like sexuality and religion and sometimes you have to just go on whether they were married in a church and that tells you the indication. It's not a perfect way of doing it; you can't go back in time and ask that person how they identify,
HZ: Yeah, because if people have been dead long enough to qualify to be a space eponym, then it was much more difficult for them to be out, for instance.
ANNIE LENNOX: Oh, absolutely, yeah, totally. But the point is that doing this and doing it acknowledging that it's not perfect is better than not having that resource at all. Ideally this will be presented to the International Astronomical Union and can be integrated with their current database of named features and then going forward can be maintained. That’s what I would love.
HZ: So you're doing all of the space features, not just craters.
ANNIE LENNOX: That's right, yeah, all of them.
HZ: No biggie.
ANNIE LENNOX: I know, I know. Yeah. No, no bother at all. I'm super stoked.
HZ: So many bloody moons! Just moons all over the place.
ANNIE LENNOX: I know. I know. Actually, some of the moons that we've been looking at are interesting ones because they tend, like Venus, to have a lot of mythological characters represented. And so one of the diversity things that we can look into is whether there's an over representation of certain mythologies, which there certainly is, like almost all of it is Roman, or if not Roman, probably Greek, but there are cases of Celtic mythology being used, and Egyptian. But, even within characters of whatever religion, we're still looking into whether it's mostly gods, or if there's equal gods and goddesses. Sexuality's a really weird one to do with that, because what was sexuality in the time of ancient Greece? You know, everyone just loved everything.
HZ: Zeus would stop at nothing.
ANNIE LENNOX: Yes! So there's an awful lot of things to unpick. But it is really interesting.
HZ: I’ve been covering the eponyms beat for much of this show’s nine-year lifespan, and during that time became increasingly beset by the question: should eponyms be stopped? Would it just be easier not to name things after people?
ANNIE LENNOX: It's a question I've been asked before, and I'm in two minds, because really, there's not a right way to name things after people. Inevitably, it will start off being quite imbalanced, that's a trap that we've always fallen into, whether it's naming road signs or, you know, statues or features on planets. Always it's cis white males who are first and foremostly represented. That being said, I think there's something so lovely about having a bit of humanity. Within science, you know, science can be incredibly - well, it has to be data driven and it has to be many things. And sometimes human and compassionate doesn't always have a place there. And I think there should be. So I do love the idea of having a little bit of humanity represented.
HZ: You can sometimes see where scientists were having fun, too.
ANNIE LENNOX: We have one large crater with, on top of it it's got two overlying smaller craters and so that's the Disney crater because it's very much the little Disney ears.
HZ: Are they like, “Now you can't publish photos of it without paying Disney for the likeness”?
ANNIE LENNOX: Yeah, probably, probably, no doubt. The ones we've had rejected, which I'm a little sad about, is, someone tried to name something after Freddie Mercury, so it would have been the Mercury crater on Mercury, which would have been great, but it's not happening.
HZ: It’s not just the outright eponyms that present difficulties.
ANNIE LENNOX: Tectonic features on Mercury called rupēs, they're named after ships. Actually, one of the problems that's come to light with that is that, for many places, ships are named after significant political figures. All of Russia do that, certainly. And so you kind of feel like you're supporting that politician rather than the research vessel. And also I don't even know if that would be accepted because of this political rule. But, one that I'm not sure if someone just said they were going to submit it, or if it was actually rejected: but they could, in theory, have a Boaty McBoatface rupēs, which I think I would be in support of.
HZ: Yeah, I was thinking, if we did stop with the eponymy, does that mean you're going to get a lot of Crater McCraterface?
ANNIE LENNOX: Yeah, almost definitely, yeah. When you're involved in scientific missions as well, there's quite a lot of cases where if you're looking at a small area, people are just going to start their own informal classification systems, because you can't go through the IAU for those timescales. And also sometimes, it's just like they've got an interesting boulder or a ridge or something, and so there is no convention for those types of features. so you get a lot of people of things to just called like “The Mound”. Someone suggested the other day to start naming certain features of their area after ice cream flavours, things like that, just their own informal systems - which I'm not mad about.
HZ: No, although people can get very heated about which is the best flavour, so, there's always potential for fights.
ANNIE LENNOX: There's always potential to anger someone.
HZ: Whenever I talk about this stuff, I get some angry people complaining about raising it. What kind of responses did you get when you were first publicly talking about this?
ANNIE LENNOX: My first couple outings, when I spoke about this, were generally really well received. Which I think is just as well, because if they weren't, and I got some of my later responses initially, I don't know if I'd have taken this as far as I have. It's a very difficult thing when something is not your PhD project. You know, this is a side project. This is my passion project.
HZ: You’re not getting paid for this.
ANNIE LENNOX: Exactly. And for folk to tell you, as they have, that it's a waste of time and that I shouldn't be doing it - it's really disheartening.
HZ: On 17th October 2022, Annie published “An Open Letter to the International Astronomical Union (IAU): Issues of power and its influence on naming conventions for planetary features.” She wrote about the eponym data she had collected, showing the imbalances of representation, and how that is perpetuated by some of the problems with the naming conventions.
ANNIE LENNOX: And I've had some really quite entertaining responses. In fact, some of them I've printed out and put here. If you don't mind, I'll read a couple out to you, because I think they're really enjoyable.
HZ: I would love it.
[Annie goes off to another part of the room to collect letters and comes back to her desk.]
ANNIE LENNOX: This one here was sent from a professor, a female professor, I was really surprised. And this was in response to the open letter that I put out addressed the IAU. And she said that perhaps it made sense that all craters were named after men because, and I quote, “Craters are very dangerous, bringing explosions, fire and death. Typical male attitude, who makes wars everywhere.” So I kind of love that. This one was a guy who went to great lengths to stay anonymous. They created a new email, an anonymous one -
HZ: Always a good sign.
ANNIE LENNOX: I know! - to send me: subject headed “Are you serious?” And it says, “Hi, I'm a very old physicist. I don't wish to reveal my identity, which nowadays can be changed at will. I came across your event, Planetary Nomenclature Hackathon, organised by you and a few others. I found it just ridiculous. What's good to rewrite history? Go to China, and you'll find many places renamed after the communist rule. What's wrong with the percentages you show on the poster?” This is in reflection to the two percent being named after women. “It was by widely agreed conventions at the time” -
HZ: “Widely”.
ANNIE LENNOX: - “and the community were dominated by male physicists. Are you great enough to do judges [sic] to their achievement? No physicists so far as I'm aware, through my long career, which would even bother [sic] what you were” - what? “So sad to see good physics traditions strained by politics in this way. It's called cultural revolution in China.” I think he's comparing these planetary hackathons to communist China, is what I'm getting from this.
HZ: Certainly does seem to be the theme.
ANNIE LENNOX: “Please dig a bit into the catastrophic history when pure physics was meddled by short-sighted politics. It's a waste of time and money. Surely you won't listen and press on ahead, but history will prove me right. May God rest your wrestling heart, and may you find joy in real physics.”
HZ: He seems to have contradicted himself in that last part.
ANNIE LENNOX: I know! When I first put out the open letter - that was a letter addressed to the International Astronomical Union - and kind of just laid out what the issue was and I got, all in all, a pretty good response from that.I expected a little bit of backlash from non-science people who kind of just like to get angry, but I was really disappointed by how many scientists were telling me what a waste of time it was and how this isn't how science should be spent. And that was really disheartening to come from the community.
HZ: Were there any pleasant surprises in the ways that people responded?
ANNIE LENNOX: Oh, yeah, totally. I actually have a folder on my emails for when I have a bad day and it's called ‘Nice’, and every nice response I've had to putting things out there, I put in that folder, and I can go and read them whenever I'm sad. But it has been really really well received, by and large. The hackathons have been so lovely. It's brought together people from all over, mostly the UK, because that's where the in person hubs have been, but also America and further afield. And people are so supportive and share concern and compassion on the issue, which has been a lovely thing to witness. The next Hackathon will be in April time. It's very much open to anyone. And so, if there's anyone who might listen who would be excited to be part of it, I would welcome that with open arms, absolutely.
HZ: Go to theallusionist.org/craters for information about getting involved with the hackathons. And whatever else might come in the future?
ANNIE LENNOX: It would be a really valuable thing to have perhaps a directory of, a place where people can suggest names for these kind of things, because inevitably, it's a small group of quite diversity-minded people that have a massive impact in terms of representation. For example, the area I'm mapping, the craters there: six have been named after women, and half of those have been done by me, you know? So it really is just a small group that have a big impact. But what would be a great resource is if we could get input from people all over the world, and suggesting names, and there's obviously no guarantee that those names could or would be picked, and if they were picked, whether they'd be accepted or rejected; but I think it'd be a really interesting conversation to find out who people want to be represented.
HZ: Would you have thought when you were starting this PhD where it was going to take you?
ANNIE LENNOX: Not at all. I mean, when I started doing geology in general, I didn't even think it would end up going into space. So that was already a bit of a leap. And now that I find myself doing still my space science work, but so much in terms of equality and diversity: it's not the trajectory I had planned, but it's one that really fuels me in a massive way.
Space science is in this really good position where, because exploration is happening so quickly, and to such an extent - like it really is the whole universe - conventions are constantly being written, because we are exploring more places. And so they're in this unique position where they can now, going forward, start doing conventions that really consider implicit bias, and those kind of imbalances of the past and how to counteract those. So I think this might be a good step forward in bringing to light those imbalances and hoping that in the future it gets a bit better.
HZ: It's certainly not a step back.
ANNIE LENNOX: No, no.
HZ: Annie Lennox is approaching the final stretch of her PhD in the geology of Mercury. And she’s holding another hackathon in April 2024, so if you want to get involved with researching who all the space eponyms are, you can - I’ll put info at theallusionist.org/craters.
Staying on the space theme for a moment: Dune part 2 was just released, and working on constructing the languages for the film is David J. Peterson, so what a great time to travel through the Allusionist archives and listen to the episode Verisimilitude, wherein David J. Peterson talks about what goes into creating languages for fictional worlds, and it’s a lot - really incredible attention to detail.
And if you want to help keep the Allusionist going, in a highly uncertain media landscape, become a member of the Allusioverse at theallusionist.org/donate. And as well as funding this show, you get fortnightly livestreams with me and my collection of reference books. You get behind the scenes information about the making of every episode - in this one there were some things I didn’t want to share publicly, but I’ll share with members of the Allusioverse! And best of all, you get the company of your fellow Allusionauts, in the Allusioverse Discord community, one of the most wholesome places on the internet. Join us for as little as two American dollars a month: theallusionist.org/donate.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
regulus, noun, chemistry, archaic: a metallic form of a substance, obtained by smelting or reduction. Origin 16th century, from Latin, diminutive of rex, reg- ‘king’; origin as ‘regulus of antimony’, apparently so named because of its readiness to combine with gold.
Try using ‘regulus’ in an email today.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman. Thanks to Sheila Kanani and Adam Richardson. The music is by Martin Austwick of palebirdmusic.com.
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