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By Emily Lakdawalla

Anahita Lakdawalla has Landed!

Aug. 12, 2006 | 15:27 PDT | 22:27 UTC

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by Emily Lakdawalla

My husband and I would like to share our joy in welcoming Anahita Sarah Lakdawalla to the planet. She was born August 3, 2006, weighing 7 pounds 3 ounces (3260 grams) and measuring 19.5 inches (49.5 cm). The EDL was fairly smooth with only a couple of minor anomalies and we exited the landing site as planned on sol 2 to begin our surface operations together.

Here's a pic from sol 6, snapped by her doting grandma, who also made the way-cool planetary blanket. Don't ask me where she found a fabric that so perfectly reproduced the Voyager images of the outer planets!

Click to enlarge >

Anahita Sarah Lakdawalla, sol 6
Anahita Sarah Lakdawalla, born on August 3, 2006, was just six days old when she was captured here reaching for Saturn. Credit: Anahita'a Grandma

I have to share a story here about the name. My husband is Parsi, an Indian ethnic group that originated in Persia; they prefer names that appear both in their (originally Persian) culture and that will be familiar to Indians. So the list of possible baby names is relatively short, and many of them are extremely difficult for Americans to pronounce. We picked the name Anahita just because we liked it and had settled on the choice in April.

So late in the evening on April 11, I was sitting in the lobby of my hotel in Darmstadt, Germany, unwinding from the busy day of celebrations for the arrival of Venus Express at Venus, and decided to Google the name to find out its significance. And what should it say in the Wikipedia entry but:

Anāhitā (or Nāhid in Modern Persian), whose name means "unstained" or "immaculate", was an ancient Persian deity. Her cult was strongest in Western Iran, and had extensive parallels with that of the Semitic Near Eastern "Queen of Heaven", deification of the planet Venus...In Modern Persian Nāhid (Anāhitā) is the name of the planet Venus.

How amazing is that? Just after I made this discovery, Venus Express project manager Don McCoy and one of his engineers walked in to the hotel, headed for the bar, and they invited me to join them; as we talked I had to share this coincidence with them (see the end of my last blog entry for the Venus Express trip). They bought me a drink to celebrate (I stuck with juice) and we toasted Anahita as we toasted Venus Express.

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