May Taytay sa Mars. Officially. Bacolor, Camiling, Daet, Naic, Solano and Taytay all appear as approved crater names in the Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature.
The six names connect an official map of the Red Planet to towns in the Philippines. They arrived on that map at different times.
Camiling, Daet and Naic were adopted in 1976. Solano followed in 1991, while Bacolor and Taytay were adopted in 2006.
The International Astronomical Union’s naming categories draw names for smaller Martian craters from small towns and villages around the world, generally with populations of approximately 100,000 or fewer.
The convention provides a large pool of names. It is not intended as a special commemoration of each town.
That makes these names part of a worldwide system for identifying features on another planet. The surprise for Filipino readers is how familiar a few entries in that system sound.
