Naming of Pluto's Mountains and Craters Ended on Friday; Around 40,000 Names Submitted

As per the news report of Tech Times, NASA has announced that submission of possible names for the mountains and craters of Pluto ended on Friday.

NASA sought the help of the public by giving the opportunity to give a name to the planetary features of Pluto.  This is to better identify properly the features found on the planet like a crater or a tall mountain.

New Horizons spacecraft is currently on its voyage to reach Pluto and Charon's orbits on July 14, 2015.  It will be the very first time to get closer to Pluto and get more details and its map in great detail.

NASA came up with the idea for the people to submit names in order to help the scientists in identifying a feature as the mission of the satellite is to gather as much information. 

When data starts to come in, of course a name is necessary for each feature which will be collected by the New Horizons Science Team in collaboration with the International Astronomical Union (IAU) which is assigned for discovered cosmic objects.

The names submitted were around 40,000 according to Mark Showalter, team member of the New Horizons Science.

The submitted names were classified by the IAU into three major groups, The History of Exploration, The Literature of Exploration and The Mythology of the Underworld.

The Mythology of the Underworld theme contains Underworld beings or those who have traveled the Underworld with their settings on human culture. Theme of The History of Exploration contains space vehicles, historic explorers, engineers and scientists.

For The Literature of Exploration, it will have fictional ships of exploration, their origins and their destinations and the authors and artists behind each of them.

It is known that Pluto will be very last to have images taken by a spacecraft in orbit.