What’s common to Kerala’s largest river, its largest fort, its most popular beach and two of its towns that helped propel India’s space dreams? They all now have a second address — 225 million kilometres away on Mars.
All these places — Periyar river, Bekal fort, Varkala beach, and Thumba and Valiamala — are among the newest names for geological features on Mars, according to an announcement by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) on November 24.
In all, seven Indian names feature in the latest list prepared by the IAU’s Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature. The name of two other locations on Mars honours M S Krishnan, the renowned geologist and the first Indian to become the director of the Geological Survey of India in 1951.
The crater named after Krishnan measures 77 km in diameter and is believed to be over 3 billion years old. And a plain surface to the southeast of this crater, about 50 km in diameter, will be known as Krishnan Plaus.
The IAU has chosen a 9 km wide crater along the eastern region of the Krishnan crater to be named after Varkala. Varkala beach is one of the most visited tourist locations in Kerala. The Varkala cliff holds significance geologically — its jarosite remains offer the closest links to Martian land composition and could offer clues to Martian evolutionary history.
Valiamala is a relatively smaller crater (13.5 km diameter) to the west of the Krishnan crater. Valiamala is the home of the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology.
A crater located to the south east of the Krishnan crater has now been named after Thumba, the birthplace of the Indian Space Research Organisation. It was in November 1962 that Vikram Sarabhai chose this coastal town in Kerala to establish the Equatorial Rocket Launching Centre. Today, the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, called the backbone of ISRO, operates near Thumba.
The name Periyar has been chosen for the lone Martian valley located along the southern region of the Krishnan crater. Periyar is Kerala’s longest river, running 300 km from the Shivagiri hills in Tamil Nadu to the Arabian Sea near Cochin.
The IAU has identified a tiny, independent crater located to the east of the Krishnan crater as Bekal (4.9 km diameter). It is named after the mid-17th century fort in the northern Kerala town of the same name. Overlooking the Arabian Sea, the Bekal fort was in the hands of the Keladi Nayaka dynasty, Hyder Ali of Mysore and then the British.
Apart from these seven Indian names, the Martian surface also has geological features named after the Ganga. But these names were not proposed by India.