Which Glenelg are you looking for, sir?

Glenelg, Mars

So I'm sitting here, enjoying a late breakfast and a cup of tea, surfing the Internet as usual.  Necessarily that involves reading The Guardian Online because no day is complete without my habitual dose of the newspaper I've been reading for forty years.  I am that most disparaged of British left wingers ... a committed Guardian reader. 

Anyway ...

My attention was snared by this headline:

Nasa's Mars Curiosity rover finds that 96-mile-wide crater once held lake

It's a bit hard for a non-science person like me to get my head fully round the idea that for over two years now the Mars rover Curiosity has been trundling over the inhospitable surface of the red planet that is - on average - 225 million km distant from us.  Even the idea that there's no fixed distance between our two planets takes a bit of getting used to, although I do understand both Mars and the 3rd Rock revolve around the sun, that planets have different orbits and we're always in motion so that when we're at our closest the two planets are only - only he writes - about 54 million km apart but can reach as much as 400 million km distant.  (You'll need to take more than one bus to make that long journey, Douglas.)

Truth be told the article is jam-packed full of amazing and fascinating factoids that greatly increase the respect, admiration and awe with which I regard space geeks and boffins.  You know ... I like words and sentences and, therefore, literature; beginnings, middles and ends (although not necessarily in that order).  So I'm left flummoxed, wondering, "how do they know things like these ...?"

• There was a lake in the crater 3.5 billion years ago;
• That Mars could, therefore, have supported microbial life;
• How can they tell Mount Sharp wasn't there when the lake was there?

Glenelg, South Australia

But here's the aspect of all this space travel and Mars exploring I like the most.  Its human dimension, even though no human has yet set foot on the red planet.  Who was it, I wonder, decided to call the area shown in the Mars photograph Glenelg?  

Glenelg, Scotland

I have been to both Glenelg in South Australia and Glenelg in Scotland.  There can be no surprise then when I tell you, neither looks even remotely like Glenelg on Mars.
 
We're a funny old bunch, we humans.  Name it and it's not so scary, never again quite as alien as it was when it was simply uncharted, broken rocks on the surface of a planet far, far away but not too, too far away.