BRUNSWICK

NASA’s Curiosity rover has been crawling across the surface of Mars since 2012, but last week, crossed over into a section of the red planet unofficially named Bar Harbor.

R. Alieen Yingst is deputy principal investigator for one of the cameras currently working on the Curiosity and a Brunswick resident. Yingst is a member of the Pejepscot Historical Society who helped name a Martian rock after Civil War hero and Bowdoin College President Joshua Chamberlain.

Yingst said that naming areas of the planet’s surface is important, and that while the folks at NASA had fun doing so, they don’t take the process lightly.

“To insure that nobody puts their favorite cat’s name on Mars, we have rules that give us a naming convention,” said Yingst.

To help map out the planet’s surface, Curiosity’s landing area has been separated into kilometer square sections called quadrangles, each of which are named for small American towns. While the dune buggy sized rover is investigating the Bar Harbor quadrangle, any rock or point of geological significance examined will be named after a Maine landmark.

Yingst said everyone on the Curiosity team, as well as other NASA scientists, put their heads together and came up with a list of quadrangle names from small towns that they had visited or had relatives in.

“This wasn’t just two or three people,” Yingst said. “A lot of us put our heads together. These names are unofficial internationally, but I don’t believe they will ever be changed. Bar Harbor was a very popular one.”

When asked if the town of Bar Harbor, Maine, knew a slice of Mars was named after them, town deputy clerk Sharon Linscott said she hadn’t heard about it.

The Curiosity rover will now spend an unspecified amount of time in the Bar Harbor quadrangle, searching for interesting landmarks and space rocks, while on its ultimate mission of crossing the 96-mile-wide Gale Crater, which the rover has been in the process of doing since 2012. The crater is thought to be a lake bed that housed liquid water billions of years ago.

“This is an area where life would have found a happy place,” said Yingst. “The only way you get stones to break down the way they have here is to have once had water.”

A list of Maine landmark

names have been applied to the objects discovered in the Bar Harbor quadrangle, including Wonderland — a popular trail in Acadia National Park — and Egg Rock Island in St. George. Yingst expects many more names from the Pine Tree State to be used before Curiosity moves into the next quadrangle.

“If we don’t find much, we’ll drive through Bar Harbor in three or four weeks,” said Yingst. “But we could find something interesting and potentially stay for a lot longer.”

Curiosity will roam the surface of Mars until 2020, when its radio isotopic engines will run out of energy.

bgoodridge@timesrecord.com