A 3.5 billion-year-old crater on Mars will henceforth be known after M.S. Krishnan, the pioneering Indian geologist. The International Astronomical Union (IAU) has approved it and several other names for Martian landforms proposed by two Kerala-based researchers.
Apart from ‘Krishnan,’ the IAU has also accepted several Kerala-based names for smaller landforms associated with the crater. These are ‘Valiamala,’ ‘Thumba,’ ‘Bekal,’ ‘Varkala’ and ‘Periyar’ for smaller craters and a vallis (valley). Which means, these places in Kerala now have counterparts on Mars.
The naming proposal was jointly submitted by Asif Iqbal Kakkassery, formerly research scholar at the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology (IIST) here and who is now Assistant Professor in Geology at Government College, Kasaragod, and Rajesh V.J. of the Department of Earth and Space Sciences, IIST.
Born in Thanjavur in what was then Madras Presidency in 1898, Dr. Krishnan was the first Indian to be director of the Geological Society of India. As for the other names, it is the first time that place names from Kerala are being adopted for Martian features, the team said.
“The plain inside Krishnan Crater has been officially named Krishnan Palus, and a channel cutting across it has been named Periyar Vallis,” Dr. Rajesh said.
The findings have been published in the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science.
