Lunar Crater named after Arctic explorer Matthew Henson: Name Proposed by LPI/NASA

The International Astronomical Union has named a crater at the Moon’s south pole after the Arctic explorer Matthew Henson, a Black man who is 1909 was one of the first people to stand at the very top of the world. The proposal to name the crater after Henson came from Jordan Bretzfelder, an Exploration Science summer intern with the Lunar and Planetary Institute, in Houston, TX, which is a member of the Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute, headquartered at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley.

In NASA’s missions today, putting the diverse backgrounds of humanity at the forefront of space exploration is a core part of the agency’s values. Located between Sverdrup and de Gerlache craters at the south pole of the Moon, Henson Crater is in the same region the Artemis program aims to land the next slate of lunar explorers, which will be selected from NASA’s increasingly diverse astronaut pool.