Florida’s declining Space Coast, naming mountains on Pluto and silly rock bands

Name game: does that crater look like a Steve, or maybe a Carol? (Courtesy: IAU/L Calçada)

By Hamish Johnston

When I was a young lad back in the late 1960s, my family would join the annual March migration of Canadians to Florida. Along with alligator farms and the endless beaches, the Kennedy Space Center was a popular tourist destination and I can still remember visiting it and getting a solar spinner globe as a souvenir. Sadly, since the end of the Space Shuttle programme in 2011, Florida’s “Space Coast” has fallen on hard times. While there are still rocket launches – there are two planned for April – thousands of NASA employees have been let go and the surrounding communities look worse for wear. The New York-based photographer Rob Stephenson has put together a collection of images taken in and around the centre that he calls “Myths of the Near Future”. To me the photographs evoke the allure of the space age as well as the inevitable decline of any human endeavour.

While the Space Coast may be suffering, NASA is still sending missions into space and very soon its New Horizons mission to Pluto will reach the dwarf planet. To drum up some excitement, NASA has joined forces with the SETI Institute and the International Astronomical Union to ask the public to suggest names for features on Pluto and its moon Charon. If you can’t think of any names, you can also vote on the suggestions of others. There is much more information about the campaign at the Our Pluto website.

If you can’t think of names for craters on Pluto, how about names for a rock band made up of physics professors in a collective mid-life crisis. There are a few suggestions over at Timothy McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, but I think that Physics World readers could do much better. Here are a few suggestions to get you going and please share any gems you dream up by leaving a comment.

• Stoner Excitations
• Stimulated Emission
• Quark Stars
• The Wrinklons
• Baby Universe
• Pump and Probe
• Van Allen (AKA the French Van Halen)