New York USA (9 October 2009 LT) — The Lunar Geographic Society (LGS) has announced that a crater on Luna, Earth’s Moon, has been renamed to honor musician and peace activist John Lennon.
The crater, which is located in the Moon’s Lacus Somniorum (“Lake of Dreams”) district, has been given the honorary designation as the John Lennon Peace Crater on the occasion of the 69th anniversary of Mr. Lennon’s birth.
Forty years ago, in March 1969, Mr. Lennon and his wife, the artist Yoko Ono, staged their first “Bed-In For Peace” in Amsterdam. The event was followed in June of the same year by a second “Bed-In” in Montréal, during which Mr. Lennon composed and recorded the anthem “Give Peace A Chance.”
It is estimated that a quarter-million protesters sang the chorus from “Give Peace A Chance” at the first Vietnam Moratorium Day, held on 15 October 1969. Since then, the song has been adopted by anti-war activists around the world.
Mr. Lennon, whose colorful and often controversial life was cut short in 1980, left a lasting legacy as an activist against war, bigotry, sexism and other forms of injustice.
As a musician and founder of The Beatles, in partnership with Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, Mr. Lennon was one of the most successful and influential artists in the history of entertainment. He was inducted, posthumously, into the Songwriters Hall of Fame (1987) and into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (in 1988 as a member of The Beatles, and in 1994 as a solo artist), and received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award (1991).
The crater designated to honor John Lennon was previously known as Daniell D, and is located at 37.05º North Latitude and 25.85º East Longitude on the Earth-facing side of the Moon. It measures approximately 5.81 kilometers in diameter, with a depth of about 990 meters.
The John Lennon Peace Crater is part of the Daniell crater group, named for John Frederic Daniell (1790-1845), a London-born physicist, meteorologist and professor of chemistry. It is the largest of three satellite craters to Daniell, and rests in the heart of the Moon’s magnificent Lake of Dreams.
The official designation of a Lunar crater is a singular honor bestowed upon only a select few historical figures. Among those receiving this rare tribute over the past century are Leonardo da Vinci, Christopher Columbus, Sir Isaac Newton, Julius Caesar and Jules Verne.
The Lunar Geographic Society is the world’s largest and most prominent group advocating privatized exploration, settlement and development of Earth’s Moon. The centerpiece of the Society’s effort is a $3.8-billion (USD) program to return humans to the Moon and establish permanent bases there.
The Lunar Geographic Society has also developed the most successful commercially-available lunar photomap software ever released to the public, the Full Moon Atlas, which is used by astronomers and in classrooms around the world.
The Society successfully advocated the removal of a crater named for an accused Nazi war criminal, Dr. Hans Eppinger, Jr., by the International Astronomical Union, and was the prime mover behind the draft proposal to designate a group of Lunar craters as a memorial to the seven crew members who perished in the 2003 Space Shuttle Columbia (STS-107) tragedy. (See https://lunargeographic.com/news/columbia_region.shtml)
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JOHN LENNON PEACE CRATER INFORMATION:
Eponym: John (Winston) Ono Lennon
IAU Designation: Daniell D
Location: Central Lacus Somniorum (37.05° N 25.85° E)
Approximate Crater Diameter: 5.81 kilometers
Approximate Crater Depth: ~990 meters
John Lennon photograph: Lenono Photo Archive/Yoko Ono
John Lennon Peace Crater on ImaginePeace.com
This article is reprinted from https://lunasociety.org/john-lennon-peace-crater
