Patches of land that the Mars rover drove past are called Quincy and Squantum.

To folks in the eastern reaches of Quincy during rush hour, Squantum can seem a million miles away. That’s obviously wrong – in reality, it’s never much closer than 33.9 million miles.

Well, that applies to its Martian namesake, at least.



In the depths of a crater on Mars, there are two square miles named after the City of Presidents: one is Quincy, and the other is Squantum.



That’s because Dr. Fred J. Calef III, the “keeper of the maps” for the NASA Mars Science Laboratory team that works on the Curiosity rover, hails from Quincy.



The team of scientists was encouraged to name parts of the Red Planet after places on earth, so Calef named them after his hometown.



“Literally, the end of my street was a granite quarry, so I got my interest in geology from that,” the geologist said.



Other square-mile quadrants have been named after places in Canada, South Africa and Maine.



Though not from the Squantum neighborhood, the University of Massachusetts-Boston grad said that the peninsula is worthy of some interplanetary love because of its own notable geography.



“In Squantum, there’s a chunk of Africa,” he said.



That’s because of nearly 3 billion years of continental drift on a planet that has been shaped the way it is now for less than a hundred million years.



The geologist elaborated by saying that there’s rock in Squantum that these days is normally found in Africa. It ended up here because hundreds of millions of years ago, the continental landmass that now includes the Boston area area ran up against what would become the African continent.



There are also indications on Squantum rock formations that they were shaped by glaciers moving in an entirely different direction than the glaciers that meandered down from Canada in fairly recent ice ages that ended about 12,000 years ago. The Squantum rocks match up with rocks in Africa, indicating that they were caused by long-ago glaciers that moved over a world when Squantum and parts of Africa were right near each other.



Unfortunately, even though traffic and parking likely are better in the Martian versions of Quincy and Squantum, the rover ended up not passing through them.



“The rover landed just east of them,” said Calef, whose work includes figuring out where the Mars rover is and noting all the different Martian geographic features.



Curiosity landed on Mars in August 2012 after departing from Earth more than nine months earlier, a commute any denizen of the terrestrial Quincy likely can empathize with. The rover plopped down in the middle of what we earthlings call the Gale Crater, which actually billions of years ago was a 100-mile-wide lake full of water, Calef said.



A main goal of the mission is for the rover to see if Mars ever could have supported life. Curiosity does this is by using rocks to see what the characteristics of the water used to be – such as the acidity, sodium content and more. By doing that, scientists have already come to the conclusion that in some ways it wasn’t that different from Wolly Beach.



“By Earth-based standards, it was habitable,” Calef said.

– Sean Cotter covers Quincy for the Ledger. He may be reached by email at scotter@ledger.com or by phone at 617-786-7049. Like the Ledger page on Facebook to follow more South Shore news.