Three craters on Mars named for physicist Devendra Lal, towns in UP, Bihar

Ahmedabad, (PTI) Three recently discovered craters on the surface of Mars have been named for renowned cosmic ray physicist late Devendra Lal and the towns of Mursan and Hilsa in northern India.

While the discovery was made by a team of scientists which included researchers working at the Physical Research Laboratory (PRL) here in 2021, the naming was approved by an international body earlier this month.

The three craters are situated in the Tharsis volcanic region of the Red Planet, said the Ahmedabad-based PRL, a unit of the Department of Space of the Government of India, in a release on Wednesday.

Tharsis is a vast volcanic plateau centered near the equator in the western hemisphere of Mars. The region is home to the largest volcanoes in the Solar System.

On the recommendation of the PRL, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature on June 5 approved naming the craters as "Lal" crater, "Mursan" crater and "Hilsa" crater, PRL director Anil Bhardwaj said in the release.

Mursan and Hilsa are the names of towns located in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, respectively.

The discovery of the craters provided compelling evidence that water moved large volumes of sediment into the newly discovered Lal crater, and also confirmed that Mars was once wet and water has flown on its surface, the statement said.

As per an article published by scientists Rajiv Bharti, Isaac Smith, S K Mishra, N Srivastava and Shital Shukla, the discovery was made within the Mangala crater of Mars using SHARAD (Mars SHAllow RADar sounder), a subsurface sounding radar mounted on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) probe -- a spacecraft designed to search for the existence of water on Mars as part of NASA's Mars Exploration Program.

Bharti, Mishra and Srivastava are associated with the PRL. Shukla is attached to Gujarat University, while Smith is with York University at Toronto in Canada.

The Lal crater is 65 km wide, and the biggest among the three. Professor Devendra Lal, for whom it was named, was director of PRL during 1972-1983.

Mursan and Hilsa craters are around 10 km wide and superimposed on the eastern and western sides of the rim of the Lal crater, the PRL release said.

"The entire area of Lal crater, in the Tharsis volcanic region on Mars, is covered with lava. There are geophysical evidence of material other than lava in this crater, with a 45-m thick sedimentary deposit in the subsurface of the crater, obtained using subsurface radar SHARAD/MRO," the PRL said.

Mursan and Hilsa craters provide "the timeline for the infilling process of the Lal crater and suggest that the infilling has been episodic," the release added.