Douglas Adams had an asteroid named after one of his characters; now the late Ray Bradbury has lent his name to the spot where Nasa's rover Curiosity landed on Mars.

Nasa announced yesterday – which would have been Bradbury's 92nd birthday – that the landing site of Curiosity was now called Bradbury Landing, in honour of the science fiction author who died earlier this year. The Curiosity team tweeted: "In tribute, I dedicate my landing spot on Mars to you, Ray Bradbury. Greetings from Bradbury Landing!", also sharing a picture of the site.

Curiosity landed on Mars on 5 August, beginning a two-year exploratory mission. Bradbury, who died in June aged 91, was the author of hundreds of short stories, as well as the novels Something Wicked This Way Comes and Fahrenheit 451. His classic collection of stories The Martian Chronicles, written in the 1940s, imagined man's experiences on Mars telepathic Martians who lived there. "The Martian desert lay broiling like a prehistoric mud-pot, waves of heat rising and shimmering," he writes in The Earth Men. "There was a small rocket-ship reclining upon a hilltop nearby."

"This was not a difficult choice for the science team," said Michael Meyer, Nasa programme scientist for Curiosity. "Many of us and millions of other readers were inspired in our lives by stories Ray Bradbury wrote to dream of the possibility of life on Mars."

The stories in The Martian Chronicles range from that of a Martian woman in an unhappy marriage who lives in "a house of crystal pillars on the planet Mars by the edge of an empty sea", Ylla, to the arrival of humans on the red planet. "'You live on the fourth planet from the sun. Correct?'" the captain introduces himself to the first Martian he meets. "'Elementary,' she snapped, eyeing them," before slamming the door in their faces.

Bradbury is not the first science fiction writer to make a mark on space. In 2001, the International Astronomical Union named asteroid 18610 Arthurdent, in honour of Adams, and in 2009 Nasa's spacecraft tweeted lines from Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as it crashed into the moon: "And what's this thing coming toward me very fast? So big and flat and round ... it needs a big wide sounding name like 'Ow', 'Ownge', 'Round', 'Ground'! ... 'That's it! Ground! Ha! I wonder if it'll be friends with me?".