Nepal's quake-hit village Langtang gets tribute on Mars!

Image courtesy: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The fatal earthquake that hit Nepal in 2015 is hard to forget. The amount of lives lost, unfathomable.

One of the worst hit villages was the popular trekking site, Langtang where 215 people were killed, due to the April 25, 2015 avalanche that was triggered by the quake.

A year later, the village is being taken to Mars! Well, literally.

The International Astronomical Union has christened a 9.8 km (six mile) wide crater on Mars, Langtang.

Why? Well, according to the man behind this, Tjalling de Haas, this christening is a 'tribute' to the Nepali village, where his colleague had worked while studying the Himalayan glaciers, as told to BBC.

Dr de Haas, who studies Mars's physical geography at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, also said that, “It was his base camp for a long period, so we said maybe it's a nice tribute to call [the crater] Langtang.”

Langtang was a "scientifically important" crater, de Haas said. "The marks on the top of the crater wall were probably water flows, and below them you can see ridges -- the remains of former glaciers."

He has named another crater Bunnik, after his hometown near Utrecht. Both names were approved by the International Astronomical Union Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature.

(With IANS inputs)