An illustration of Mons Mouton, a mesa-like lunar mountain that towers above the landscape carved by craters near the Moon’s South Pole. Credits: NASA/Science Visualization Studio
Naming a mountain on the Moon …
Watching and helping from space …
And a sample wide shot from Mars … a few of the stories to tell you about – This Week at NASA!
Moon Mountain Named in Honor of NASA Mathematician
A mesa-like mountain near the Moon’s South Pole has been named “Mons Mouton” after NASA mathematician Melba Mouton. In the early days of NASA, she led a group of mathematicians whose calculations helped track spacecraft in orbit. “Mons Mouton” is adjacent to the site at which NASA’s VIPER mission will land and explore as part of NASA’s Artemis program.
Maps derived from data collected by PALSAR-2 on the Advanced Land Observing Satellite-2 on February 8, 2023 shows damage caused by the devastating earthquake in the Republic of Turkey in the cities of Nurdaği, Kahramanmaraş, and Türkoğlu.
NASA Data Help with Turkey, Syria Earthquake Response
Following the devastating earthquakes in southern Turkey and western Syria, NASA’s Earth Observatory is working to share aerial views and data from space to help relief and recovery efforts in that region. Learn more at earthobservatory.nasa.gov.
Perseverance’s Portrait of the Sample Depot: An annotated version of the portrait captured by NASA’s Perseverance shows the location of the 10 sample tubes in the depot. The “Amalik” sample closest to the rover was about 10 feet (3 meters) away; the “Mageik” and “Malay” samples farthest away were approximately 197 feet (60 meters) from the rover. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS
Astronomers estimate 50,000 sources of near-infrared light are represented in this image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Their light has traveled through varying distances to reach the telescope’s detectors, representing the vastness of space in a single image. A foreground star in our own galaxy, to the right of the image center, displays Webb’s distinctive diffraction spikes. Bright white sources surrounded by a hazy glow are the galaxies of Pandora’s Cluster, a conglomeration of already-massive clusters of galaxies coming together to form a megacluster. The concentration of mass is so great that the fabric of spacetime is warped by gravity, creating an effect that makes the region of special interest to astronomers: a natural, super-magnifying glass called a “gravitational lens” that they can use to see very distant sources of light beyond the cluster that would otherwise be undetectable, even to Webb. Credit: Science: NASA, ESA, CSA, Ivo Labbe (Swinburne), Rachel Bezanson (University of Pittsburgh), Image Processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI)
Webb Uncovers New Details in Pandora’s Cluster
The latest deep field image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope features a region of space known as Pandora’s Cluster. A megacluster of galaxies there acts like a natural magnifying glass that allows much more distant galaxies in the early universe to be observed.
