Q. In CMOS 8.117, why are Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Polar Lander not italicized? Aren’t they the names of specific spacecraft?
A. Italics are normally reserved for creative as opposed to descriptive names. Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Polar Lander are the names of specific vehicles launched by NASA, but they’re both based on generic descriptions: The first name refers to a spacecraft that was launched to do a global survey of Mars (while orbiting that planet), and the second names a spacecraft designed to explore the south polar region of that same planet (after having landed on its surface).
Phoenix also refers to a specific spacecraft that was sent to Mars, but “Phoenix” is a name, not a description, so it gets italics (including when used with a generic description, as in “NASA’s Phoenix Mars lander”).
Trivia: Though italics for names are now usually limited to ships and other named vessels, it was once relatively common to find the names of people and places in italics, as in two influential eighteenth-century English novels: Samuel Richardson’s Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded (vol. 4, London, 1742, via Internet Archive) and Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (vol. 1, 1749, via HathiTrust).