The International Astronomical Union’s Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature lists Mount Marilyn’s origin as: “Astronaut named feature, Apollo 11 site.”
Not: named after Marilyn Lovell, who waited through four days of Apollo 13 not knowing whether her husband was coming home, who hid a pregnancy for four months because she feared NASA would see it as a distraction and ground him. Not: named for the woman who received a mink coat on Christmas Day 1968 with a note Jim had arranged before launch — “To Marilyn from the Man in the Moon” — and who wore it over her pajamas while doing her chores alone.
Just: astronaut named feature.
The bureaucratic apparatus that finally, after forty-nine years, ratified the name also stripped out the reason for it.
Jim Lovell named the mountain in December 1968, orbiting the moon on Apollo 8. The feature was distinctive — a pyramid shape he could recognize across multiple orbital passes, useful for navigation. He checked with the other crew members to see if anyone had claimed it. They hadn’t. “Then I found it, and I’m going to name it,” he said later. “What do you guys think of ‘Mount Marilyn’?”
He didn’t expect the name to last. He didn’t think it was his place to petition the IAU. The name survived because it turned out to be useful: Apollo 10 used it to check their timing during landing rehearsal. Apollo 11 used it as a landmark for the descent into the Sea of Tranquility. What started as a private gesture became a piece of navigation infrastructure.
The IAU made it official in July 2017. They did not, however, attribute it to Marilyn Lovell. The rules had changed since 1973; names couldn’t honor specific living individuals. So officially, “Marilyn” was simply a female first name assigned to a feature. The association with Jim Lovell’s wife was, in the IAU’s framing, “merely a back story.”
Jim Lovell had kept the 2017 campaign a secret from Marilyn. He told her when the recognition came through. She was, according to him, quite amazed.
Jim Lovell died in August 2025 at ninety-seven, buried next to Marilyn at the Naval Academy Cemetery.
He didn’t live to see what happened eight months later, when the Artemis 2 crew — the first humans at the moon since Apollo 17 — spoke from beyond the farthest distance any person had traveled since 1972. Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen’s voice thickened as he described a crater at the boundary between the near and far sides, sometimes visible from Earth. “Her name was Carroll,” he said. “The spouse of Reid, the mother of Katie and Ellie. It’s a bright spot on the moon, and we would like to call it Carroll.”
Then Hansen said Jim Lovell’s name. He invoked the tradition. He said this is what astronauts do when they’re close enough to the moon to see it.
Mission Control went silent for nearly a minute before answering: “Integrity and Carroll crater, loud and clear.”
The gazetteer says “astronaut named feature.” The gazetteer is not wrong, exactly. But the gazetteer describes what the name is, not what it did.
What it did: it propagated. Through Lovell’s own accounts, through Ron Howard’s film, through forty years of interviews and histories and the quiet fact that the name was too useful to discard even when the IAU refused to officially assign it to anyone. The story moved through human channels — the channels that run alongside the official record, sometimes faster, sometimes more truthfully.
The IAU ratified the name and erased the meaning in the same stroke. The meaning survived anyway. And when Hansen named Carroll crater, what he was continuing wasn’t the IAU’s approval process — it was the story that the map doesn’t contain.
Jim Lovell didn’t live to see his private gesture become a lineage. But a private gesture in 1968 is what Hansen reached for when he needed words at 270,000 miles from home.
The map says: astronaut named feature.
The story says: a man orbited the moon and named a mountain after the woman waiting for him, and fifty-eight years later, another crew did the same thing, and said his name when they did it.
One of those is in the gazetteer. The other is what anyone actually remembers.