On October 20th 2012 a twinning ceremony took place in Glenelg, complete with a live link to NASA, to celebrate the twinning of the village with Glenelg on Mars!
At the time Nasa’s roving robotic laboratory, Curiosity, was headed for a geological feature on the Red Planet that has been called Glenelg.
Guests included former Nasa astronaut Bonnie Dunbar, who flew on five space shuttle missions in the 1980s and 1990s on Challenger and Columbia.
Ms Dunbar’s paternal grandparents came from Scotland. Her grandfather Charles Dunbar was born in Dundee and her grandmother Mary was born close to Gardenstown, near Banff.
Nasa’s Mars mission team has been using names taken from Canada’s Northwest Territories to label the places the rover is visiting.
The Canadian north-west has some ancient rock formations thought to be of a similar age to those found in Gale Crater, Curiosity’s landing site.
The naming system is an attempt to make it easier for scientists and the public to understand what is being discussed when a particular location comes up in conversation.
Glenelg on Mars takes its name from a particular rock found in the Northwest Territories but of course the place name has its roots in the Scottish Highlands.
The placename is also found in other parts of the world.
There is a beach resort in Adelaide, Australia, named Glenelg. It was established in 1836 and named after Lord Glenelg, a secretary of state for the then colonies and an MP for Inverness and Fortrose. There is also a small community in the Canadian Province of Nova Scotia.
And finally Glenelg, Maryland in Howard County, Maryland USA.