Talk:List of quadrangles on Mercury

Official quadrangle names

Do the Mercury quadrangles have official names? I'm asking because the quadrangle names given here are those used in NASA's Atlas of Mercury (1976) following the Mariner 10 mission. The names can be seen here. That map also shows how only some of the quadrangles were mapped by that mission. Much of the rest of the planet has only been mapped by the MESSENGER spacecraft more recently (since it entered orbit in 2011). Hence new information and names appearing as can be seen at the Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature. On their website, I found a quadrangle map of Mercury with different names for the quadrangles, see here. Six of the quadrangles there have different names to the 1976 NASA atlas. My question is whether this is a deliberate difference (i.e. there are official quadrangle names that have changed), or whether the quadrangle names are unofficial? The quadrangles mapped in 1976 seemed to have been named after prominent craters within those quadrangles, though obviously this couldn't be done for the unmapped ones not observed in 1976. So have the ones mapped more recently been renamed, or are the quadrangle names used by the Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature just unofficial ones (they seem to be naming them after large craters within the quadrangles)? I may e-mail them and ask, but thought I'd ask here first.

The differences are:

• H-5 Apollonia -> Hokusai
• H-4 Liguria -> Raditladi
• H-10 Pieria -> Derain
• H-9 Solitudo Criophori -> Eminescu
• H-14 Cyllene -> Debussy
• H-13 Solitudo Persephones -> Neruda

Incidentally, the 'H' in the numerical designation stands for 'Hermes', from what I read somewhere. Carcharoth (talk) 00:01, 10 September 2013 (UTC)