NASA/JPL named two sites on Mars after an author

Black science fiction author who believed she could write better stories than those in B-grade movies, and a former NASA senior director who gazed at the stars while growing up in a remote part of Africa have been honored with Mars Perseverance sites named after them.

The names of Octavia Butler, a visionary award-winning writer, and Jakob van Zyl, a brilliant engineer and manager who helped send spacecraft across the solar system, are now part of the Perseverance rover’s mission. Their names now designate where the rover landed and where it will watch the Ingenuity helicopter fly.

"There's a tradition for Mars rover teams to name their landing sites after someone they want to commemorate," says Kathryn Stack Morgan, deputy project scientist of the Mars 2020 rover mission.

The model we used was the Mars Science Laboratory's Curiosity rover mission, which named its site after (science fiction author) Ray Bradbury in 2012."

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory designated the Perseverance rover’s landing site as the Octavia E. Butler Landing on March 5, just 13 days after touchdown on the Martian surface.

Van Zyl has a strong personal connection to the Mars 2020 staff. Many of them worked alongside him on some of JPL's most notable missions.

The helicopter tests are the first powered flights on another planet. The observation area was originally called "Twitcher's Point," a reference to the British term "twitcher", used for someone who will travel a long distance to see a rare bird.

Both designations add personal touches and human faces to an ambitious, much-anticipated space mission in which unmanned vehicles are the stars. 

In talking about Butler, people on the JPL team said "so many of us were inspired by science fiction, to become scientists, engineers and pursue space exploration," Stack Morgan says.

The designation was also "a way to reach beyond the planetary science community that, like many other STEM fields, is not very diverse." Stack Morgan says.

"By naming the Perseverance landing site in honor of Octavia E. Butler, we were hoping to make a connection between the mission and someone who has served as an inspiration and connection to science for those typically underrepresented in the planetary science community, and STEM fields more broadly."

The designations also give close-knit JPL teams a chance to pay tribute to a colleague.

Van Zyl passed away unexpectedly of a heart attack at age 63 on Aug. 24, a month after the Perseverance launch. He is survived by his wife, Kalfie, and two siblings.

He retired from the JPL in 2019 after a 33-year career that included a number of management positions. After his retirement, he co-founded Hydrosat, a startup to develop satellites to measure ground moisture for agricultural applications.

The Ingenuity helicopter was one of his last projects at the JPL. 

Jakob meant a lot to everyone at JPL, the Ingenuity team in particular," says Robert Braun, director of Planetary Science. Van Zyl was his predecessor.

"When the Perseverance and Ingenuity teams decided to name this overlook in his honor, I thought it was perfect. If he were here today, he would be looking over the team and wishing them well. There's something poetic, something that just feels right about this.

Van Zyl was "in many ways our benefactor at JPL," says Tim Canham, Mars helicopter operations lead.

"He was the one who went out and rustled up support for us. He's been highly influential over the years for a lot of these technology demonstrators. We couldn't have gotten there without him."

NASA will cite Octavia Butler and Jakob van Zyl in mission reports and scientific papers, ensuring each a place in space exploration history. It's a fitting honor because, despite their vastly different backgrounds, both were drawn to the stars.

Both traveled a long way to the peak of their professions.

Science fiction aficionados — readers, college professors and publishers — hold Butler in high regard.

"She's important because she's a pioneer and the first Black female science fiction author," says Lisa Yaszek, Regents professor of science fiction studies in the School of Literature, Media and Communication at Georgia Tech.

Butler rose to prominence in the traditionally white bastion of science fiction. She was the first to write about prominent Black characters in science fiction settings, using dystopias, time travel and other tropes. 

"She was literally one of the first, if not the first, Black women to publish in modern science fiction magazines under her own name," Yaszek says.

She was also the first Black woman to win both the Hugo and Nebula awards, which are the top awards in science fiction," Yaszek says. "That's like getting the Oscar and the Golden Globe."

Her most impressive recognition came in 1995, when she became the first science fiction author to receive a $295,000 award as a prestigious MacArthur Foundation Fellow, often called a Genius Grant.

In 2000, she was given the PEN American Center Lifetime Achievement Award in Writing.

None of that came easy.

Born in 1947, Butler grew up in Pasadena, California, not far from the California Institute of Technology, which manages the JPL for NASA. "(Butler's selection) was a kind of local tie-in to JPL and the mission," Stack Morgan says.

Butler's father died when she was 7, and she was raised as an only child by her single mother and maternal grandmother.

It was a difficult life of poverty.

"Her mother was a maid; she would bring home books her employers threw away," says Shelley Streeby, author of "Imagining the Future of Climate Change" and professor of Ethnic Studies and Literature at the University of California San Diego.

"Octavia would create piles of them in her room and read them later. She would go to the Pasadena Public Library and the downtown public library. They were like second homes to her."

Butler was shy in school and struggled with dyslexia. She was bullied because she had difficulty with schoolwork and because of her height — she was reportedly 6 feet tall at 15. Despite her dyslexia, she read everything she could and found comfort in reading and writing.

Mars was indirectly the reason Butler decided to write science fiction.

She was widely quoted as saying she decided to become a science fiction writer at age 9 after seeing the 1954 movie "Devil Girl From Mars," a low-budget film awful enough to be a candidate for Mystery Science Theater 3000 or RiffTrax ridicule.

Everyone's heard that story but, "It encouraged her to try her own hand at writing science fiction and imbue it with more ambitious ideas and themes, connected to Black history and the future of our planet," Streeby says.

Butler's books have surged in popularity in the wake of climate change and political partisanship.

"She emphasizes survival, how we will create possibilities in the wake of disaster," Streeby says. 

On Sept. 3, 14 years after her death, Butler made her first appearance on the New York Times best-seller list. "Parable of the Sower" was listed at No. 14, fulfilling a declaration Butler wrote in a notebook in 1988.

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"If you've never read Octavia Butler before, or even if you've never read science fiction in particular, she's a wonderful writer to explore," says Sheree Renée Thomas, editor of the "Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction."

"She's a master storyteller. She wrote from the inside of the characters out, in terms of really wonderful character development. These are people you can root for, which is important, especially when she places them in extraordinary, challenging circumstances."

Beyond that, "she was one of the first people to put the experiences of Black women at the center of science fiction," Streeby says. Before that, "they were rarely protagonists in science fiction stories and novels."

Butler returned to Mars throughout her career.

"Most of her stories were set on Earth, but in both the final books of her Lilith's Brood and Parable series, Mars becomes the destination for humans who find they need something more or different than the futures here on Earth," Yaszek says.

Butler left an impression on those she encountered. She was mentored early in her career by speculative fiction authors Harlan Ellison and Samuel R. Delany. In turn, she made sure to mentor up-and-coming writers herself.

"She was a great person," Thomas says. "When you first met her, you were a little nervous, because she's very tall and stately, her personage is very elegant and beautiful, with a distinctive voice.

"I would encourage you to listen to her interviews, to hear her voice. (She had) a great sense of humor and was very insightful."

Octavia Butler died Feb. 24, 2006, at age 58, after a fall at home. She was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2010.

Her name can be found beyond Mars.

A mountain on Charon, one of Pluto's moons, was named Butler Mons (mons means "mountain") after being discovered by the New Horizons space probe in 2015.

And 7052 Octaviabutler is an asteroid in solar orbit between Mars and Jupiter that was given her name after its discovery in 1988.

Jakob van Zyl: Team member in the trenches
Jakob van Zyl was born in Outjo, in Namibia, Africa, in 1957. Th