Bend, apparently, has universal appeal. A local author researching a book on the exploration of Mars found that folks with NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) named a crater on the red planet after Bend. The crater was named in 1976 and is located at 22.6 degrees south and 27.8 degrees west on the planet. But don’t break out the telescope looking for it. The crater is only 3.6 kilometers in diameter and can be seen only in pictures taken by spacecraft with high-powered cameras. Comparatively, the Bend crater is about one-third the size of Crater Lake.