Ultima Thule, the farthest cosmic body ever visited by a spacecraft, has been renamed Arrokoth, or “sky” in the Native American Powhatan language, following a backlash over the previous name’s Nazi connotations.
The icy rock, which orbits in the dark and frigid Kuiper Belt about a billion miles beyond Pluto, was surveyed by the NASA spaceship New Horizons in January, with images showing it consisted of two spheres stuck together in the shape of a snowman.
Its technical designation is 2014 MU69, but the New Horizon team nicknamed it Ultima Thule (pronounced Tool-ey) after a mythical northern land in classical and medieval European literature described as beyond the borders of the known world.
That name sparked an angry reaction as it was co-opted by far-right German occultists in the early 20th century as the fabled ancestral home of “Aryan” people — the term they used to describe proto-Indo-Europeans.
Members of Thule Society founded a political party that evolved into Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party, and the term remains popular in alt-right circles.
It is, for example, also the name of a Swedish white-power rock group.
The new official name, which was chosen by the New Horizons team and ratified by the International Astronomical Union, was announced in a ceremony at NASA headquarters on Tuesday.
A NASA statement made no mention of the controversy.
“The name ‘Arrokoth’ reflects the inspiration of looking to the skies and wondering about the stars and worlds beyond our own,” said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado.
“That desire to learn is at the heart of the New Horizons mission, and we’re honoured to join with the Powhatan community and people of Maryland in this celebration of discovery.”
NASA added that they had received consent from Powhatan Tribal elders, and the name was chosen to associate the culture of the native people who lived in the region from where the object was first discovered.
Both the Hubble Space Telescope, which found the object in 2014, and the New Horizons mission at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory are operated out of Maryland, whose Chesapeake Bay region is home to the Powhatan people.
Responding to a query by AFP, NASA emphasized Ultima Thule was only ever a nickname — but did not comment on whether the Nazi controversy played a role in it being discarded. — AFP
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