Names
The mission is named after the fictional Spanish knight from Miguel de Cervantes renowned novel, Don Quixote, who charged against a windmill, thinking it to be a giant. Like the Don, the Hidalgo spacecraft will 'attack' an object much larger than itself, hopefully with more impressive results. 'Sancho' is named after Sancho Panza, the Don's squire, who preferred to stay back and watch from a safe distance, which is the role assigned to that probe. Finally, an Hidalgo was a minor Spanish title(roughly equivalent to a Baronet now obsolete; in the novel, it was the title Alonso Quijano had even before becoming Don Quijote.
Read more about this topic: Don Quijote (spacecraft)
Famous quotes containing the word names:
“The world is a puzzling place today. All these banks sending us credit cards, with our names on them. Well, we didn’t order any credit cards! We don’t spend what we don’t have. So we just cut them in half and throw them out, just as soon as we open them in the mail. Imagine a bank sending credit cards to two ladies over a hundred years old! What are those folks thinking?”
—Sarah Louise Delany (b. 1889)
“I would to God thou and I knew where a commodity of good names were to be bought.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Watt’s need of semantic succour was at times so great that he would set to trying names on things, and on himself, almost as a woman hats.”
—Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)