A TINY West Highland village has appeared on Nasa's radar and the space agency is sending over a top astronaut to check it out.
The 280 residents of Glenelg have been following the robot space rover Curiosity's progress across Mars to the rock formation which has been named after their community.
Now a twinning ceremony will be held on October 20 in the village to mark Curiosity's estimated time of arrival at the other Glenelg.
Scottish-American astronaut Bonnie Dunbar is due to appear at the event and will take part in a candlelit walk and a ceilidh. The Astronomer Royal for Scotland, John C Brown, is also among the guests invited.
The director of the Mars rover mission, Doug McCuistion, will also be in the Nasa party. He was previously the director of flight programmes for Nasa's Earth Science Enterprise.
The Martian Glenelg was named after a geological feature called Glenelg near Yellowknife, the capital of Canada's North West Territories.
The link is that Yellowknife is the name the scientists gave to the relevant quadrant on their map of Mars, so the features in it were named after those associated with Yellowknife in Canada.
Meanwhile, back in Glenelg, which historically was part of Inverness-shire but now has a Ross-shire postal address, they have been surprised by the response of Emma MacLean, the local development officer for the area.
She said: "The interest for the event from the international community and our local community has been out of this world, so much so we are having to issue a limited amount of tickets for the event."
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