NASA nombra cráter en Marte 'Antofagasta'

NASA’s Curiosity team informally named a small crater on Mars “Antofagasta” in mid-April, after the Chilean region and city near the Atacama Desert. (science.nasa.gov) The name appeared in a Curiosity mission update dated April 14, 2026, written by deputy project scientist Abigail Fraeman at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She said the rover had spent the prior week driving toward the crater. (science.nasa.gov) Fraeman described Antofagasta as about 10 meters, or 32 feet, across. She said the team chose the name informally, not as a formal planetary map label. (science.nasa.gov) Small impact craters matter to rover teams because they can expose buried rock the way a fresh road cut exposes older layers underground. Fraeman called craters “nature’s drill” because their walls and ejecta can bring deeper material up to the surface. (science.nasa.gov) From orbit, the team thought Antofagasta might be relatively young by Martian standards — less than 50 million years old. That raised the chance that some excavated rocks had spent less time under Mars’ surface radiation, which destroys organic molecules. (science.nasa.gov) Curiosity reached the rim during planning for April 17, 2026. Lucy Lim, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, wrote on April 21 that the crater looked fresh and deep, with a well-defined rim. (science.nasa.gov) But the floor did not cooperate. Lim said dark, rippled sand covered the most interesting rock layers, and the rover team judged the risk of driving into that sand too high. (science.nasa.gov) The team also checked nearby blocks that might have been crater ejecta from deeper layers. Lim wrote that the rocks in the crater wall looked too similar to identify a clear drilling target, so the team decided not to drill in or around Antofagasta. (science.nasa.gov) Instead, Curiosity turned to the rocks around the rim, where the workspace included abundant polygonal textures. NASA said the plan included imaging, geochemistry and close-up observations of those polygon-bearing rocks. (science.nasa.gov) Those polygons had already drawn attention in the April 14 update. Fraeman said Curiosity had been crossing rocks covered by “thousands of honeycomb-shaped polygons” that stretched for meters across the ground. (science.nasa.gov) NASA has long used “polygonal patterned ground” to describe honeycomb- or spiderweb-like surfaces on Mars. In a separate agency explainer, NASA said such polygons can record cracking and other processes tied to ice, temperature cycles and past climate conditions. (science.nasa.gov) So the Antofagasta story is less about an official renaming of Mars and more about how rover teams work: they assign informal names, test a promising target, and move on when the terrain blocks the science. At Antofagasta, the Chilean name stuck, but the drill did not. (science.nasa.gov 1) (science.nasa.gov 2)