Background

If you have ever flown, you have almost certainly seen codes to represent airports. Maybe you flew into John F. Kennedy International Airport and saw its code JFK, or Los Angeles International Airport, with its code, LAX. These codes are part of a system derived by IATA, the International Air Transportation Association, that assigns a code to every commercial airport on the planet. This system follows absolutely no system. But maybe you are an aviation enthusiast, and have spent hours studying airport codes all over the world. If you did that, you would probably notice the presence of another, 4-letter system. You have just stumbled on the ICAO aerodrome system. The International Civil Aviation Organization, part of the United Nations, assigns a four-letter code, this time to every aerodrome, including non-commercial ones.

So....Region J

Great. You learned a lot of useless information about some airport codes. Where does it get interesting? The first letter of any ICAO code is a region code. K is for Continental America, S for South America, U for modern Russia (used to be USSR), and, what's this? J? You can look around on maps all you want, you won't find a region J. Nevertheless, take a look here on Wikipedia, and a region J is still listed. Turns out you have to zoom out a bit, and.........switch to a different planet! Region J covers all aerodromes on the planet of Mars.

Why?

This is a good question. In 2021, NASA's Mars Rover Perseverance landed on the Martian surface at a crater called Jezero Crater. This is the only place on Mars to currently have received a code, JZRO, currently. The spot, called the Wright Brothers Field, received this code after Ingenuity took flight. In the future, when I hope we have colonized planets throughout our solar system, maybe there will be a new way to name spaceports. However, for the time being, this first extraterrestrial ICAO code seems like a sign this might stick around for a while.