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* South Korea’s Korean Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (KPLO) Good. Carry on. * Japan’s SLIM (Smart Lander for Investigating the Moon) No! Please stop! * India’s C

* South Korea’s Korean Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (KPLO) Good. Carry on. * Japan’s SLIM (Smart Lander for Investigating the Moon) No! Please stop! * India’s Chandrayaan-3 Good. Carry on. * Russia’s Luna-2 Good. Carry on. * United Arab Emirates ... with a rover called Rashid Good. Carry on. What a shame Japan had no history or mythology to fall back on when naming its moon lander and had to adopt the excruciating American convention of trying to shoe-horn in some ridiculous 'acro-bbreviation' instead.

pjc50 4y ago
I checked their original press release and .. that's simply what it's called: https://www.jaxa.jp/press/2016/07/files/20160714_slim_01_j.pdf https://www.jaxa.jp/press/2016/07/files/20160714_slim_01_j.p... 小型月着陸実証機 (Small Moon Landing Demonstration Machine) Edit: https://www.isro.gov.in/chandrayaan2-faq https://www.isro.gov.in/chandrayaan2-faq "The name Chandrayaan means “Chandra- Moon, Yaan-vehicle”". Luna, of course, another word for moon. So almost all of these moon vehicles are simply named "moon vehicle" or synonym in another language.
- Normille 4y ago
  Thart's not what I'm objecting to. It's those tortured acronyms that hurt my brain.
mrastro 4y ago
Contrarian opinion : to the extent this matters (which is not much), the acronym is fun and more memorable. You'll remember SLIM, even if you forget what the individual words it stands for, because it's a single word. Being memorable helps with getting public support by staying the public conscience which is needed for these multi-million dollar space investments.
- Normille 4y ago
  The trouble is that, with a lot of these names, [although, to be fair, not in the case of SLIM] the acronym is so tortured it is of no help with remembering what it stands for, anyway. For example, they sometimes use the second letter of the word, or random pairs of letters... * JAXA – Japan Aerospace eXploration Agency * MESSENGER – MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging ...or miss words out entirely, when they don't fit the acronym: * BLAST – Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope * BOOMERanG –Balloon Observations of Millimetric Extragalactic Radiation and Geophysics * FAME – Full-sky Astrometric Mapping Explorer * FIRST – Faint Images of the Radio Sky at Twenty-Centimeters * HARPS – High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher * MARVEL – Multi-object Apache Point Observatory Radial Velocity Exoplanet Large-area Survey This one even uses other acronyms within its own acronym... * MUSTANG – Multiplexed SQUID TES Array at Ninety GHz So, as well as remembering what MUSTANG stands for, you also need to remember that the S = SQUID = "Simultaneous Quad Infrared Imaging Device" and the T = TES = 'Thermal Emission Spectrometer' Arrrghhh!Just make it stop, already! I can't help but imagine a scene like something from a Gary Larson cartoon; where a project chief sticks his head round the door of a research lab, saying "How are the designs for the Mercury probe coming on?" whilst a room full of white coated scientists guiltily covert up scraps of paper on which they've been idly doodling 'MERCY.. MIDAS... MUON... MONTAGE...' etc. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_astronomy_acronyms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_astronomy_acronyms

pjc50 4y ago

I checked their original press release and .. that's simply what it's called: https://www.jaxa.jp/press/2016/07/files/20160714_slim_01_j.pdf https://www.jaxa.jp/press/2016/07/files/20160714_slim_01_j.p... 小型月着陸実証機 (Small Moon Landing Demonstration Machine) Edit: https://www.isro.gov.in/chandrayaan2-faq https://www.isro.gov.in/chandrayaan2-faq "The name Chandrayaan means “Chandra- Moon, Yaan-vehicle”". Luna, of course, another word for moon. So almost all of these moon vehicles are simply named "moon vehicle" or synonym in another language.

Normille 4y ago
Thart's not what I'm objecting to. It's those tortured acronyms that hurt my brain.

mrastro 4y ago

Contrarian opinion : to the extent this matters (which is not much), the acronym is fun and more memorable. You'll remember SLIM, even if you forget what the individual words it stands for, because it's a single word. Being memorable helps with getting public support by staying the public conscience which is needed for these multi-million dollar space investments.

Normille 4y ago
The trouble is that, with a lot of these names, [although, to be fair, not in the case of SLIM] the acronym is so tortured it is of no help with remembering what it stands for, anyway. For example, they sometimes use the second letter of the word, or random pairs of letters... * JAXA – Japan Aerospace eXploration Agency * MESSENGER – MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging ...or miss words out entirely, when they don't fit the acronym: * BLAST – Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope * BOOMERanG –Balloon Observations of Millimetric Extragalactic Radiation and Geophysics * FAME – Full-sky Astrometric Mapping Explorer * FIRST – Faint Images of the Radio Sky at Twenty-Centimeters * HARPS – High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher * MARVEL – Multi-object Apache Point Observatory Radial Velocity Exoplanet Large-area Survey This one even uses other acronyms within its own acronym... * MUSTANG – Multiplexed SQUID TES Array at Ninety GHz So, as well as remembering what MUSTANG stands for, you also need to remember that the S = SQUID = "Simultaneous Quad Infrared Imaging Device" and the T = TES = 'Thermal Emission Spectrometer' Arrrghhh!Just make it stop, already! I can't help but imagine a scene like something from a Gary Larson cartoon; where a project chief sticks his head round the door of a research lab, saying "How are the designs for the Mercury probe coming on?" whilst a room full of white coated scientists guiltily covert up scraps of paper on which they've been idly doodling 'MERCY.. MIDAS... MUON... MONTAGE...' etc. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_astronomy_acronyms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_astronomy_acronyms