Who was this mysterious lady in the Moon? Although it is impossible to know for certain, a co-author of this story (Sheehan) and French scholar Francoise Launay have argued that it was meant to be a celestial portrait of Cassini’s wife, Geneviève de Laistre.
A ladies club starts to form
As more women gained recognition for their scientific aptitude and accomplishments, selenographers bestowed their names on lunar craters. Still, women remained a distinct minority. Among those honored were redoubtable 18th- and 19th-century figures such as Nicole-Reine Lepaute, Mary Somerville, and Caroline Herschel (whose crater, C. Herschel, is much less distinguished than that given to her brother William).
More recently, women honored on the Moon include Maria Mitchell and several of the human “computers” who analyzed photographic plates at the Harvard College Observatory: Wilhelmina Fleming, Antonia Maury, Annie Jump Cannon, and Henrietta Swan Leavitt. Marie Curie, the first double Nobel laureate, was honored with her maiden name, Sklodowska, nine years before her husband, Pierre, got his own crater.
The first woman in space, Russian cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, is the only one officially honored while alive — she’s still going strong in early 2019. In the latest count of the more than 1,600 craters on the Moon, only about 30 bear a woman’s name. Part of this reflects stringent rules set by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the governing body for naming features on the Moon and other planetary bodies. The rules were adopted to prevent solar system nomenclature from becoming utterly chaotic and capricious. But it also, no doubt, exposes the long-standing sexism and discouragement of women in mathematics and science in Western culture.
Though generally (and in view of past abuses, not unreasonably) strict about adopting the names of people still alive, the IAU has overlooked this rule on occasion. Tereshkova is a prime example, and several Apollo astronauts also have been honored. Other exceptions have sneaked in because only insiders knew their back stories. For example, American mappers in 1976 named a small lunar crater “Kira” in tribute to the eminently worthy Kira Shingareva, principal scientist at the Planetary Cartography Laboratory at the Space Research Institute in Moscow.
Against this background of the IAU insisting on the integrity of lunar nomenclature, we come to what is undoubtedly the most interesting feature from the Apollo era to receive a personal name: Mount Marilyn. It doubles as the only Apollo landmark visible to earthbound observers through binoculars or a small telescope.