5 days ago
Part of Mars is now named after this UNM researcher. Here's why.
Jun. 14—In his high school yearbook, Horton Newsom wrote down his plan for the future: "College and then Mars." Now, a 100-meter-wide landmark on the Red Planet bears his name.
For decades, Newsom devoted his life to research in outer space, primarily at the University of New Mexico, where he worked as a planetary scientist for nearly 40 years and even helped operate a rover that explored Mars.
On his way to visit his adult children in California in April 2024, Newsom suffered a medical episode as he was driving, causing him to lose control, speed into an intersection and cause a crash that killed him.
More than a year later, a geographic feature on Mars was named the "Horton Newsom Point" for his decades of work devoted to researching the solar system.
"He would be so happy, he would feel so honored," said his wife, Joan Newsom. "It's a pretty important feature, and the Mars Curiosity rover, which he was a project scientist on, it'll eventually go by that feature."
The feature that bears his name is known as a yardang, a ridge created by wind erosion. This one sits near the summit of a mountain in the center of Gale Crater on Mars.
For Joan Newsom, the honor comes after many months of coping with the tragic crash.
"I nearly died myself in the car accident. So it's been a year of literally getting back on my feet," she said. "He was my best friend and soulmate, so not having him around, like, I'm so thankful that I'm alive, but I just miss having him around."
Zach Gallegos, a planetary scientist at UNM, also misses him, saying that they had worked together in some capacity since meeting in 2006 when Gallegos was an undergraduate student.
"We'd sort of gone past the realm of normal student- adviser relationship. He and I were basically research collaborators," Gallegos said. "I would be in his office sometimes four or five hours a day, where we were just looking at cool stuff that the rover was doing and making actual scientific discoveries."
While he thinks it's a "really nice thing" that a portion of the planet they studied together is named after his mentor and colleague, Gallegos is looking to other parts of outer space to pay homage to Horton Newsom.
"I'm actually right now looking at this crater on the moon... and I am working on getting the crater named after Horton," Gallegos said. "He wasn't just a Mars scientist. ... Horton, early on in his career, was looking at the interior of planets and the moon, so high-pressure experiments involving the core and mantle boundaries for other planets, and so I think that it's just fitting that he should also have a crater named after him on the moon."
Horton Newsom's time in academia began near his hometown of Oakland, California, at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1974, where he studied geology, earning a bachelor's degree. He went on to earn a master's and Ph.D. in geosciences from the University of Arizona, then continued his journey east of his home state, landing a job at UNM in 1986.
In addition to his research on campus, Horton Newsom helped operate NASA's rover named Curiosity, which is traveling across Mars. According to his longtime colleague at UNM's planetary science department, Laura Crossey, "he knew every single thing that that rover drove over."
"That's one of the things about Horton. He was enamored and fascinated by the Red Planet, probably since his youth," Crossey said. "It was super exciting and really a great honor that one of the most amazing features that's viewed — it's been a target for a long, long time — and to name that after Horton was really a marvelous thing that the international planetary community could do."
