"What's that feature over there, papa?" "Why, that's Mount Spock." "Where did it get that name?" "From the humans, before we slaughtered them." So said the first robot on Charon.

After working with the SETI Institute on the crowdsourced Our Pluto project, the NASA New Horizons team has drawn up a list of names for features on Pluto, even though we don't really quite know what the features are yet. And there's something for every kind of fan.

Some Pluto feature names are a walk through space history, like Columbia, Challenger, Sputnik, and Soyuz from the spaceship family, as well as (Percival) Lowell, (Clyde) Tombaugh, and (Jan) Oort—names of important outer solar system scientists. There are also plenty of fictional names too. Like Cthulhu, taken from the writings of H.P. Lovecraft. And Balrog, from that J.R.R. Tolkien book about short hairy people who take a long walk to a volcano.

Charon is really where it's at though, with the wish list containing Kirk, Spock, Sulu, Uhura, Leia, Vader, Vulcan, Krypton, Gallifrey, Tattooine, and even (Ursula) LeGuin, (Arthur) Clarke, and (Douglas) Adams from the real world. There's even a nod towards the writings of Stanislaw Lem with Pirx, which is what we in the business call "deep nerd."

The names for the small moons of Styx and Nyx feature names are a bit more on this side of ancient mythology. But the wishlist for Kerberos does have Laika, a great way to commemorate the first dog to go to space. Belka and Strelka are also on the list. And on tiny, tiny Hydra, there could be a Mount Smaug or Mount Jabberwock.

Still, we can't emphasize this enough: This is a wish list. For one thing, none of these features are yet confirmed. For another, the names would have to be approved by the International Astronomical Union. But lunar features have been named for real life people before, and some features on Io are named for characters in Dante's Inferno, so maybe they'll give Star Trek a chance.

Besides, Titan is where the names start to get REALLY dorky, with features named for Tolkien characters, the Dune novels, and some places and names from the writings of Isaac Asimov. For a complete rundown on what gets named what, check out this page from the United States Geologic Survey.

We're just left with a few more questions. Which of those mountains on Charon will recognize Captain Benjamin Sisko of the Federation outpost on Deep Space Nine, for instance? And when we die or are slaughtered by our creations or by sophisticated alien civilizations, who will remember the names we give these places?

The complete list of candidate names can be found here.

Source: NBC News

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