Extreme temperatures and solar radiation make life on Mercury virtually impossible, but there sure are a lot of creatives who are thriving there—in the form of craters, that is.

Ever since NASA’s probe Mariner 10 began beaming images of Mercury back to Earth in the mid-1970s, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) has been naming the planet’s craters after significant artists. The planet nearest to the sun has tens of thousands of craters (those larger than 150 miles are known as basins). Its lack of atmosphere allows space debris to impact its surface, and with no atmospheric weather, these pockmarks remain unchanged over time. To date, 437 have been named, and fortunately the Earth has two millennia worth of creatives to supply NASA with names.

The IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature recently approved the names of eight craters on Mercury. One of them was named for Ruth Asawa, the Japanese-American sculptor known for her intricate wire sculptures (and equally pinpoint drawings), whose profile is set to grow further courtesy of an internationally traveling exhibition, her first posthumous retrospective, which opens at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in Spring 2025.

The Asawa crater was named on November 14, 2024. Photo: public domain.

Asawa was part of an all-female cohort of crater names whose namesakes spanned the globe and a breadth of practices. This included Wu Shujuan, a female Chinese landscape painter from the Qing dynasty; Julia Codesido, a Peruvian artist whose work integrated influences from indigenous painting; Jumana El Husseini, a Palestinian-French artist; Maria Freire, a Uruguayan artist who pioneered non-figurative art in the country; Tahia Halim, known for expressive paintings of Nubian culture and the Nile; Kateryna Bilokur, a Ukrainian folk artist; and Ursula K. Le Guin, the author known for works of speculative fiction including The Left Hand of Darkness (1969).

According to IAU’s rules, Mercury’s craters must be named after artists who were famous for more than 50 years and have been dead for more than three years. When the first of Mercury’s craters were named, in 1976, the likes of Vincent van Gogh, Titian, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir were chosen, setting a precedent for focusing on male artists. At present, there are 100 male artists named, with Asawa’s cohort taking the total of female artists up to 29. Perhaps IAU is seeking to remedy the imbalance.

The location of Asawa on the Borealis Planitia. Photo: IAU.

Asawa is located on a large plain on Mercury called Borealis Planitia, Latin for northern plain. It’s situated west of a crater named for the great Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, southwest of American composer Aaron Copland, and due east of Frances Hodgkins, a New Zealand landscape painter.

Since first convening in 1919, the IAU has been the authority responsible for naming celestial bodies including stars and planets (and any of their surface features). Names must be 16 characters or less, belong to a deceased person, and be non-commercial in nature.

As for Mercury itself, the planet was named after the messenger to the Roman gods whose winged sandals allowed him to travel swiftly.