Longtime UNM professor honored on latest map of Mars
Departmental News
Posted: Jan 19, 2022 - 12:00pm
It is a rare honor for the University of New Mexico and for the man who led UNM’s Geology Department for more than three decades. His name is on a map of the heavens, forever. From now on, when someone looks at a map of the planet Mars, they will see a massive crater that would span from Grants to Albuquerque named for Wolfgang Elston.
Professor Wolf Elston helped, work to identify and map places on Mars for the Curiosity Rover to land on in 2012.
Elston died in 2016, with his work mapping Mars just a small part of his legacy. “Because of his dedication to New Mexico geology for his amazingly long career, generations and generations of students were trained at University of New Mexico by Wolf." And so this is a tremendous legacy of his,” Newsom said.
