The Apollo program transformed our understanding of the moon. It helped unlock our satellite’s complex history, and proved that the moon formed when a Mars-sized object slammed into Earth in the solar system’s earliest days.
Apollo’s legacy extends to the naming of several lunar features. Craters honor many of the Apollo astronauts, and Mount Marilyn — named for astronaut Jim Lovell’s wife — served as a key navigational landmark during the first moon landing. Remarkably, this recently named mountain is one of only a few lunar features that carry a woman’s name.
It’s a man’s world
Explorers, at least since Odysseus, have struggled between the urge to forge ahead toward new discoveries and to return to family and friends. You might expect this longing for home would inspire them to name newly found lands after their distant loved ones. You’d be wrong.
Christopher Columbus didn’t name anything after his wife, Filipa Moniz Perestrelo. Neither Ferdinand Magellan (whose wife was Beatriz) nor Captain James Cook (Elizabeth Batts) honored their wives with the names of faraway countries. Walter Raleigh did name Virginia after a woman, but it was his royal patroness, Elizabeth I of England, often referred to as the “Virgin Queen.” Sadly, for every million people who have heard of these explorers, perhaps only one knows the name of any of their wives.
