The unassuming neighbourhood was home to an astronomer who discovered the 17-and-a-half-mile-wide crater
There’s an unassuming suburb in South London that has made quite an astronomical impact, having lent its name to a massive crater on Mars that plunges nearly 4,000 feet deep.
Tooting, a charming area nestled within the Borough of Wandsworth, is where Pete Mouginis-Mark, the scientist who discovered the Martian crater back in 2005, spent his formative years.
He chose to name the striking celestial feature after his childhood neighbourhood. The Tooting Crater, boasting an enormous width of almost 17 and a half miles, certainly dwarfs its earthly counterpart, though it’s noticeably lacking in any form of public transport.
This interplanetary naming convention follows a long-standing tradition of craters being named after UK towns, sitting alongside the likes of Maidstone and Crewe.
Adjacent to this Martian wonder sits one of the red planet’s smaller river valleys, which apparently reminded Mr Mouginis-Mark of Tooting Bec, a place he left behind in 1970.
At the time, while serving as the acting director of the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology, he commented: “I thought my mum and brother would get a kick out of having their home town paired with a land form on Mars.”
Even Sadiq Khan — yes, that very same Sadiq Khan, who was the MP for Tooting at the time and has yet to stake any claim to crater-naming rights himself — acknowledged the excitement surrounding the cosmic connection, remarking: “This is getting a lot of attention, not only because of its twinning to our fantastic area, but also because this is probably the youngest large meteorite crater on Mars.”
Tooting is thought to have derived its name from the people of Tota, suggesting that Tota may well have been their leader.
This implies that an Anglo-Saxon man has, albeit indirectly, had a crater named in his honour.
While Tota is no longer with us, one suspects he would have been rather chuffed with the distinction.
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