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:
“It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things. Names are everything. I never quarrel with actions. My one quarrel is with words.... The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“Every man who has lived for fifty years has buried a whole world or even two; he has grown used to its disappearance and accustomed to the new scenery of another act: but suddenly the names and faces of a time long dead appear more and more often on his way, calling up series of shades and pictures kept somewhere, “just in case” in the endless catacombs of the memory, making him smile or sigh, and sometimes almost weep.”
—Alexander Herzen (1812–1870)
“Consider the islands bearing the names of all the saints, bristling with forts like chestnut-burs, or Echinidæ, yet the police will not let a couple of Irishmen have a private sparring- match on one of them, as it is a government monopoly; all the great seaports are in a boxing attitude, and you must sail prudently between two tiers of stony knuckles before you come to feel the warmth of their breasts.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)