A crater on Mars has been officially named for Wolfgang Elston, a longtime professor at the University of New Mexico, KRQE reported.
Elston, who died in in 2016, was head of the university's geology department for three decades and helped identify landing sites on Mars for the the Curiosity Rover to land in 2012, the station reported.
"Mission to Mars," a new book by Larry Crumpler, a graduate student of Elston’s in the 1970s, includes a map with the first reference to the Elston Crater.
“I was just thrilled because he had spent decades studying craters and working on lunar and planetary geology and I knew he’d be thrilled and it was such a great honor,” said Steve Elston, Wolfgang Elston's son who is now a professor at Harvard University.
Crumpler said he learned a lot from the UNM professor.
“The last time I saw Wolf I actually thanked him because he actually made me into a field geologist, which I’m now using on two different planets, because I still do it here on the Earth in New Mexico but I’m doing it daily on Mars now,” Crumpler said.
Elston, who was Jewish, fled Germany as a boy, and went to England where he attended a school for refugees, KRQE reported. He joined his parents in the United States seven years later.
“To me, what was more remarkable about my father was he’d gone through all that, and being run out of his country, barely escaping, and then being bombed, everything, and yet, he was always optimistic, he was always ready to tell a joke, he was always ready to start the next big thing," Steve Elston said. "Never seemed to have dampened his spirits at all.”
