Vulcan and Cerberus (or Kerberos) emerged as the people's choices for naming Pluto's tiniest moons in the SETI Institute's "Pluto Rocks" contest, which ended on Monday. But in the course of running the contest, the organizers fielded 30,000 write-in suggestions — and you may well see some of those suggestions surface in the future.

"I've been delighted by the response," said Mark Showalter, a planetary scientist at the SETI Institute who played a leading role in the discovery of Pluto's fourth and fifth moons. Showalter was the point person for the moon-naming contest, which drew more than 450,000 online votes over the past two weeks.

More than 20 names were on the ballot, including Vulcan (the Roman god of fire) and Cerberus (the watchdog of the underworld). Vulcan was added to the list after the contest started, at the urging of "Star Trek" actor William Shatner, and grabbed the lion's share of the votes. But there were scads of other suggestions that weren't used, mostly because they weren't in line with the International Astronomical Union's tradition that the moons of Pluto should be named after figures from Greek or Roman mythology with some sort of connection to the underworld. Pluto was himself the mythological god of the underworld.

It's the IAU that has the final say over the names for the moons, which were discovered over the past couple of years and are now known merely as P4 and P5. Now that the crowdsourcing contest is over, Showalter willl be meeting with his colleagues on the discovery team and discussing whether to go with Vulcan and Cerberus or some other names. The names selected by the discoverers will then be considered by IAU committee members for adoption or reconsideration.

"It could take one to two months for the final names of P4 and P5 to be selected and approved," Showalter said on the "Pluto Rocks" website. "Stay tuned."

M. Buie / SwRI / NASA / ESA

These two pictures of Pluto represent the Hubble Space Telescope's most detailed view of the dwarf planet, but pictures from NASA's New Horizons probe should provide better resolution.

During a Google+ Hangout, Showalter mentioned the two most frequently suggested names that were left off the ballot. No surprise there: Considering that Pluto is a Disney cartoon character as well as a dwarf planet, you'd expect that Mickey and Minnie (as in Walt Disney's talking mice) would be the favorites.

"Yes, I am a big fan of Disney myself, but no, they are not compliant names," Showalter said. Although Mickey and Minnie make a cuter couple than Orpheus and Eurydice, they're not Greek or Roman mythological characters connected with the underworld.

Some of the other names, however, may come up again. When NASA's New Horizons probe sails past Pluto in 2015, still more mini-moons might be spotted. P6, P7 and so on would provide additional opportunities for the "compliant names" on Showalter's newly expanded list. And that's not all: New Horizons' camera could to snap pictures of previously unseen features on Pluto and its moons, That opens up a new frontier for names.

The names of planetary features don't have to follow the rules about Greek or Roman mythology: On Mercury, for example, craters are named after famous writers and artists. The hydrocarbon lakes detected on Titan, Saturn's largest moon, are named after the earthly lakes they resemble. Titan's mountains are named after the fictional mountains from "The Lord of the Rings" and other works by J.R.R. Tolkien, while the Saturnian moon's dark plains are named after planets from the "Dune" science-fiction series.

For Pluto and its moons, "we have all kinds of options," Showalter said. He noted that the naming suggestions followed some potentially appealing trends — specifically, Norse mythological figures as well as characters and locations from the "Star Wars" movie series and H.P. Lovecraft's fantasy and horror tales. Might we hear about Mount Loki, the Hoth ice sheet or Cthulhu Crater in the years to come? Will some scientist pick up on the Vulcan connection and start naming the hills of a Plutonian moon after Worf, Quark, Chakotay and T'Pol? To paraphrase another character from the "Star Trek" saga: "Make it so!"

More about planetary names:

• Uwingo aims to create Baby Planet Name Book
• How about better names for alien planets?
• Solar system's not changing — just the lingo

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Paramount TV via AP file

The original "Star Trek" TV cast included Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock, the Starship Enterprise's pointy-eared science officer, and William Shatner as Captain James T. Kirk.

Just one day after astronomers asked Internet users to pick from a list of 12 names for Pluto's tiniest moons, they added a 13th name — Vulcan — at the urging of Star Trek icon William Shatner.

"Vulcan is the Roman god of lava and smoke, and the nephew of Pluto. (Any connection to the Star Trek TV series is purely coincidental, although we can be sure that Gene Roddenberry read the classics.) Thanks to William Shatner for the suggestion!" discovery team leader Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute wrote Tuesday in an update to the "Pluto Rocks" blog.

You don't have to be a hard-core Trek fan to know that Vulcan was the fictional home planet of Mr. Spock, the pointy-eared science officer on the original TV series' Starship Enterprise. Roddenberry was the series' creator. And long before he became a Priceline pitchman, Shatner played the Enterprise's skipper, Captain James T. Kirk.

The point of the "Pluto Rocks" balloting, which runs through Feb. 25, is to weigh public sentiment for the naming of Pluto's two most recently discovered moons, now known as P4 and P5. As the moons' discoverers, Showalter and his colleagues have the right to recommend formal names for adoption by the International Astronomical Union. They thought it would be fun to give the general public a non-binding advisory role.

The contest caught Shatner's eye, and he made a couple of suggestions in a Twitter update: "So what do you think of the idea of naming the two moons of Pluto Vulcan and Romulus? You have mythology, pos[itive] and neg[ative]."

Any voter can suggest write-in names, as Shatner did, but the names should refer to people, places or things in Greek or Roman mythology that have a connection to the underworld. Right now, the two favored names are Styx (which refers to a major river of the underworld as well as the rock band) and Cerberus or Kerberos (which refers to the underworld's guard dog as well as the modern-day network protocol).

More than 120,000 votes have been cast already, with less than 5,000 of them going to Vulcan — so Shatner would have to get those Vulcan votes multiplying like Tribbles to catch up to Styx and Cerberus. But that's not impossible, especially if he puts the word out to his 1.3 million Twitter followers.

As for Shatner's other suggestion, Romulus certainly has a connection to Roman mythology and Trek lore. In mythology, Romulus was one of the founders of Rome, while in the Star Trek universe, the name refers to the homeworld of a race that rivaled the Vulcans. However, one of the IAU's guidelines is that a proposed name should not be confused with pre-existing names for other celestial bodies. That poses "a bit of a problem," Showalter said.

"Romulus, along with his brother Remus, are the names of the moons of the asteroid 87 Silvia," he wrote. "They were discovered by a team led by my good colleague Franck Marchis, now a senior scientist at the SETI Institute."

Sorry, Captain. Because there's already a Romulus in this sector of the galaxy, scientists can't reuse the name. They just cannae do it.

Can you think of other mythological names with science-fiction connections? If they're not already taken, share your ideas in the comment section below — and send them along to the "Pluto Rocks" folks as well.

Update for 8:45 p.m. ET Feb. 14: Vulcan is now the top pick in the "Pluto Rocks" poll, with more than 60,000 votes out of the 234,720 responses registered. Styx and Cerberus are second and third on the list. Showalter has added eight more names to the ballot, bringing the total list to 21. The eight additions are Elysium, Hecate, Melinoe, Orthrus, Sisyphus, Tantalus, Tartarus and Thanatos. "Pluto needs more moons!" Showalter writes in a Cosmic Diary entry.

More about Pluto and its moons:

• Pluto's moons offer clues to alien worlds
• Pluto's atmosphere larger than previously thought
• All about Pluto from NBCNews.com
• Cosmic Log archive on Pluto

Check out Monday's Google+ Hangout about Pluto and the moon-naming project on the SETI Institute's website.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

This story was originally published on Tue Feb 12, 2013 11:30 PM EST

"Space Shuttle Columbia: Mission of Hope" puts a fresh spin on the 10-year-old story, turning the tragic loss of Columbia and its crew into an uplifting tale of the human spirit. How does the hourlong TV documentary, premiering Thursday night on PBS stations, pull that off? By focusing on one of the Columbia tragedy's casualties, Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon — and his connections to an even bigger tragedy, the Nazi Holocaust.

The tale's crucial pivot point is a miniature Jewish Torah scroll that was treasured by a survivor of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany: Ramon brought the scroll with him on the ill-fated mission, as a symbol of endurance. Even though the scroll was lost in the Columbia's catastrophic breakup in the skies over Texas on Feb. 1, 2003, its symbolism endures, thanks to "Mission of Hope."

"The film is not about the Columbia accident," director Daniel Cohen told NBC News. "The film is about a journey of hope. When I first started making the film, I thought I was making a documentary about the Holocaust. Then I peeled back the top layers and started to look inside, and I said, 'Wait a minute — there's a lot going on inside the story.'"

Let's start with the sacred scroll: During a death-camp bar mitzvah, the scroll was given to a teenager named Joachim "Yoya" Joseph at Bergen-Belsen by the chief rabbi of Amsterdam, a fellow prisoner at the camp. The rabbi didn't survive, but Joseph did, and the Torah held a place of honor in Joseph's office when he grew up to become an Israeli space scientist.

Ramon, a decorated Israeli combat pilot, also had a Holocaust connection. His mother was a survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp. But his connection with Joseph came in a different context: After Ramon's selection to be Israel's first astronaut, he worked with Joseph on an experiment to analyze the distribution of airborne dust over the Mediterranean and Middle East regions. Ramon noticed the scroll in Joseph's office, and asked if he could take it with him on his spaceflight. 

Joseph's experiment flew on Columbia — and so did his scroll. During one of the mission's downlinks, Ramon showed off the palm-sized treasure and told Joseph's story. "This Torah scroll was given by a rabbi to a young, scared, thin, 13-year-old boy in Bergen-Belsen," Ramon said. "It represents more than anything the ability of the Jewish people to survive. It represents their ability to go from black days, from periods of darkness, to reach periods of hope and faith in the future."

West Street Productions / Herzog

A scene from "Space Shuttle Columbia: Mission of Hope" shows Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon walking to Columbia's launch-pad entryway.

NASA via West Street / Herzog

Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon holds up a miniature Torah scroll during Columbia's final mission in 2003, as fellow astronaut Laurel Clark and mission commander Rick Husband look on.

Unfortunately, Feb. 1, 2003, was a black day. The shuttle broke up into pieces during its descent, killing Ramon and the rest of Columbia's crew: Rick Husband, William McCool, Mike Anderson, Laurel Clark, Kalpana Chawla and David Brown. Investigators determined that a piece of foam insulation that flew off Columbia's fuel tank did undetected damage to the leading edge of Columbia's left wing during launch. Sixteen days after liftoff, as the mission was ending, the hot gases of atmospheric re-entry blasted through the breach and destroyed the shuttle from the inside.

Ramon's remains were recovered and returned to Israel. Searchers even recovered the diary that he kept during the flight. But Joseph's little Torah scroll was never found. Cohen, a self-avowed space nut, said he followed the Columbia coverage closely — and took notice of a news item "buried in the back of the newspaper about this little Torah scroll that Ilan carried with him."

"I thought, wow, what a powerful new way to tell a Holocaust story to a new generation," Cohen said. He got in touch with Joseph, and over the course of several years, the filmmaker pieced together the story.

Joseph appears in the movie, although he passed away during post-production and never saw the finished product. "Mission of Hope" also draws upon interviews with Ramon's widow, Rona, as well as with Israeli investigators and former Prime Minister Shimon Peres. Candid footage of the Columbia crew's training, shot by Brown, adds a personal touch to the work.

"The overriding message of the Columbia crew ... is what they brought to each other because of their diverse background," Cohen said. "They brought the magic of diversity to each other, yet woven through that is this story of the Holocaust and this terrible tragedy."

As he gathered the footage and the interviews, Cohen struggled with a problem: He wanted to focus on the message of hope, but it seemed as if the final chapter of the story was filled with loss and despair. "The dilemma was, how do you end this film?" he said.

Then he heard that another miniature Torah scroll had surfaced, in the possession of Henry Fenichel, another survivor of the Bergen-Belsen death camp who became a physics professor in Cincinnati. Fenichel was willing to have the scroll flown aboard another space shuttle flight, at the request of Rona Ramon and under the care of Canadian astronaut Steve MacLean.

"I thought, you just ended my film for me," Cohen said.

The "Atlantis Torah" flew aboard the shuttle Atlantis in 2006, on the first space station assembly mission planned in the wake of the Columbia tragedy. "It goes from the depths of despair to the heights of hope," MacLean told reporters.

More than six decades earlier, when Joseph received his "Columbia Torah," the rabbi who gave it to him asked the boy to promise he'd tell the story of the scroll if he survived.

"Now our documentary continues the promise," Cohen said. "Woven into that is our mission to tell the story of Columbia's crew and their missions. On the 10th anniversary, we will all pause and remember the horror of the moment, a searing moment in history. But at the same time, we'll remember who these people were, and what they brought to us."

More about the Columbia tragedy:

• Columbia remembered, 10 years after launch
• Special report on the shuttle Columbia's loss
• Flash interactive: NASA's Day of Remembrance

Scott Garner

Artist Scott Garner's Still Life project uses technology similar to that found in today's smartphones to bring a traditional painting to life.

Life isn't still. Paintings don't have to be either. And now, thanks to Seattle-based artist Scott Garner, still life art is catching up with the times.

He's created an interactive gallery piece called Still Life that comes to life when tilted: the vase tips over, fruit rolls off plates and across the table, the fruit stand tumbles.

"It is about the role of technology in our lives and finding ways to switch our perspective on it a little bit," Garner told me Tuesday.

The installation consists of a traditional still life scene — a set table with fruit, plates, and an ornamental vase — presented on a flat screen TV that Garner wrapped in a traditional wooden frame.

"In any digital project, I try to find some source for more traditional craft," he noted.

This framed TV is hung on a rotating mount so that it swivels from side to side. A motion sensor is hooked to the back of the TV. As the screen moves, the tilt data is fed into a computer.

The computer, in turn, runs a video game engine from Unity 3D that Garner programmed so that it moves all the objects in the digital scene as they would in real life.

He created Still Life while an intern at superfad, a brand driven design and production company. Garner is now packing his bags to travel around before starting graduate school in digital art next year.

Where he's going is undecided, but wherever he ends up, he'll likely cast technology in new ways.

"We have amazing technology like smartphones with touch screens and accelerometers and voice recognition and all of these things, but basically you are still using it like a bunch of analog buttons," he said.

"One of the things I'm really interested in is finding ways around that, in addition to just general creative exploration."

— Via Discovery News

More on high-tech art:

• Art museums pin hopes on high tech
• Molecular movies go Hollywood
• The physics behind the movie magic
• Bio-artists bridge gap between arts, sciences

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.