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By NASA
The IAU (International Astronomical Union), an international non-governmental research organization and global naming authority for celestial objects, has approved official names for features on Donaldjohanson, an asteroid NASA’s Lucy spacecraft visited on April 20. In a nod to the fossilized inspiration for the names of the asteroid and spacecraft, the IAU’s selections recognize significant sites and discoveries on Earth that further our understanding of humanity’s origins.
The asteroid was named in 2015 after paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson, discoverer of one of the most famous fossils ever found of a female hominin, or ancient human ancestor, nicknamed Lucy. Just as the Lucy fossil revolutionized our understanding of human evolution, NASA’s Lucy mission aims to revolutionize our understanding of solar system evolution by studying at least eight Trojan asteroids that share an orbit with Jupiter.
Postcard commemorating NASA’s Lucy spacecraft April 20, 2025, encounter with the asteroid Donaldjohanson. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Donaldjohanson, located in the main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, was a target for Lucy because it offered an opportunity for a comprehensive “dress rehearsal” for Lucy’s main mission, with all three of its science instruments carrying out observation sequences very similar to the ones that will occur at the Trojans.
After exploring the asteroid and getting to see its features up close, the Lucy science and engineering team proposed to name the asteroid’s surface features in recognition of significant paleoanthropological sites and discoveries, which the IAU accepted.
The smaller lobe is called Afar Lobus, after the Ethiopian region where Lucy and other hominin fossils were found. The larger lobe is named Olduvai Lobus, after the Tanzanian river gorge that has also yielded many important hominin discoveries.
The asteroid’s neck, Windover Collum, which joins those two lobes, is named after the Windover Archeological Site near Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida — where NASA’s Lucy mission launched in 2021. Human remains and artifacts recovered from that site revolutionized our understanding of the people who lived in Florida around 7,300 years ago.
Officially recognized names of geologic features on the asteroid Donaldjohanson. NASA Goddard/SwRI/Johns Hopkins APL Two smooth areas on the asteroid’s neck are named Hadar Regio, marking the specific site of Johanson’s discovery of the Lucy fossil, and Minatogawa Regio, after the location where the oldest known hominins in Japan were found. Select boulders and craters on Donaldjohanson are named after notable fossils ranging from pre-Homo sapiens hominins to ancient modern humans. The IAU also approved a coordinate system for mapping features on this uniquely shaped small world.
As of Sept. 9, the Lucy spacecraft was nearly 300 million miles (480 million km) from the Sun en route to its August 2027 encounter with its first Trojan asteroid called Eurybates. This places Lucy about three quarters of the way through the main asteroid belt. Since its encounter with Donaldjohanson, Lucy has been cruising without passing close to any other asteroids, and without requiring any trajectory correction maneuvers.
The team continues to carefully monitor the instruments and spacecraft as it travels farther from the Sun into a cooler environment.
Stay tuned at nasa.gov/lucy for more updates as Lucy continues its journey toward the never-before-explored Jupiter Trojan asteroids.
By Katherine Kretke
Southwest Research Institute
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By NASA
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will help scientists better understand our Milky Way galaxy’s less sparkly components — gas and dust strewn between stars, known as the interstellar medium.
One of Roman’s major observing programs, called the Galactic Plane Survey, will peer through our galaxy to its most distant edge, mapping roughly 20 billion stars—about four times more than have currently been mapped. Scientists will use data from these stars to study and map the dust their light travels through, contributing to the most complete picture yet of the Milky Way’s structure, star formation, and the origins of our solar system.
Our Milky Way galaxy is home to more than 100 billion stars that are often separated by trillions of miles. The spaces in between, called the interstellar medium, aren’t empty — they’re sprinkled with gas and dust that are both the seeds of new stars and the leftover crumbs from stars long dead. Studying the interstellar medium with observatories like NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will reveal new insight into the galactic dust recycling system.
Credit: NASA/Laine Havens; Music credit: Building Heroes by Enrico Cacace [BMI], Universal Production Music “With Roman, we’ll be able to turn existing artist’s conceptions of the Milky Way into more data-driven models using new constraints on the 3D distribution of interstellar dust,” said Catherine Zucker, an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Solving Milky Way mystery
Scientists know how our galaxy likely looks by combining observations of the Milky Way and other spiral galaxies. But dust clouds make it hard to work out the details on the opposite side of our galaxy. Imagine trying to map a neighborhood while looking through the windows of a house surrounded by a dense fog.
Roman will see through the “fog” of dust using a specialized camera and filters that observe infrared light — light with longer wavelengths than our eyes can detect. Infrared light is more likely to pass through dust clouds without scattering.
This artist’s concept visualizes different types of light moving through a cloud of particles. Since infrared light has a longer wavelength, it can pass more easily through the dust. That means astronomers observing in infrared light can peer deeper into dusty regions.Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Light with shorter wavelengths, including blue light produced by stars, more easily scatters. That means stars shining through dust appear dimmer and redder than they actually are.
By comparing the observations with information on the source star’s characteristics, astronomers can disentangle the star’s distance from how much its colors have been reddened. Studying those effects reveals clues about the dust’s properties.
“I can ask, ‘how much redder and dimmer is the starlight that Roman detects at different wavelengths?’ Then, I can take that information and relate it back to the properties of the dust grains themselves, and in particular their size,” said Brandon Hensley, a scientist who studies interstellar dust at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
Scientists will also learn about the dust’s composition and probe clouds to investigate the physical processes behind changing dust properties.
Clues in dust-influenced starlight hint at the amount of dust between us and a star. Piecing together results from many stars allows astronomers to construct detailed 3D dust maps. That would enable scientists like Zucker to create a model of the Milky Way, which will show us how it looks from the outside. Then scientists can better compare the Milky Way with other galaxies that we only observe from the outside, slotting it into a cosmological perspective of galaxy evolution.
“Roman will add a whole new dimension to our understanding of the galaxy because we’ll see billions and billions more stars,” Zucker said. “Once we observe the stars, we’ll have the dust data as well because its effects are encoded in every star Roman detects.”
Galactic life cycles
The interstellar medium does more than mill about the Milky Way — it fuels star and planet formation. Dense blobs of interstellar medium form molecular clouds, which can gravitationally collapse and kick off the first stages of star development. Young stars eject hot winds that can cause surrounding dust to clump into planetary building blocks.
“Dust carries a lot of information about our origins and how everything came to be,” said Josh Peek, an associate astronomer and head of the data science mission office at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. “Right now, we’re basically standing on a really large dust grain — Earth was built out of lots and lots of really tiny grains that grew together into a giant ball.”
Roman will identify young clusters of stars in new, distant star-forming regions as well as contribute data on “star factories” previously identified by missions like NASA’s retired Spitzer Space Telescope.
“If you want to understand star formation in different environments, you have to understand the interstellar landscape that seeds it,” Zucker said. “Roman will allow us to link the 3D structure of the interstellar medium with the 3D distribution of young stars across the galaxy’s disk.”
Roman’s new 3D dust maps will refine our understanding of the Milky Way’s spiral structure, the pinwheel-like pattern where stars, gas, and dust bunch up like galactic traffic jams. By combining velocity data with dust maps, scientists will compare observations with predictions from models to help identify the cause of spiral structure—currently unclear.
The role that this spiral pattern plays in star formation remains similarly uncertain. Some theories suggest that galactic congestion triggers star formation, while others contend that these traffic jams gather material but do not stimulate star birth.
Roman will help to solve mysteries like these by providing more data on dusty regions across the entire Milky Way. That will enable scientists to compare many galactic environments and study star birth in specific structures, like the galaxy’s winding spiral arms or its central stellar bar.
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will conduct a Galactic Plane Survey to explore our home galaxy, the Milky Way. The survey will map around 20 billion stars, each encoding information about intervening dust and gas called the interstellar medium. Studying the interstellar medium could offer clues about our galaxy’s spiral arms, galactic recycling, and much more.
Credit: NASA, STScI, Caltech/IPAC The astronomy community is currently in the final stages of planning for Roman’s Galactic Plane Survey.
“With Roman’s massive survey of the galactic plane, we’ll be able to have this deep technical understanding of our galaxy,” Peek said.
After processing, Roman’s data will be available to the public online via the Roman Research Nexus and the Barbara A. Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes, which will each provide open access to the data for years to come.
“People who aren’t born yet are going to be able to do really cool analyses of this data,” Peek said. “We have a really beautiful piece of our heritage to hand down to future generations and to celebrate.”
Roman is slated to launch no later than May 2027, with the team working toward a potential early launch as soon as fall 2026.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is managed at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, with participation by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech/IPAC in Southern California, the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, and a science team comprising scientists from various research institutions. The primary industrial partners are BAE Systems Inc. in Boulder, Colorado; L3Harris Technologies in Rochester, New York; and Teledyne Scientific & Imaging in Thousand Oaks, California.
Download additional images and video from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio.
For more information about the Roman Space Telescope, visit:
https://www.nasa.gov/roman
By Laine Havens
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
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Last Updated Sep 16, 2025 EditorAshley BalzerContactAshley Balzerashley.m.balzer@nasa.govLocationGoddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
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By NASA
A Webby Award is photographed Thursday, Sept. 11, 2025, at the Mary W. Jackson NASA Headquarters building in Washington. NASA/Keegan Barber NASA has earned a spot on The Webby 30, a curated list celebrating 30 companies and organizations that have shaped the digital landscape.
“This honor reflects the talent of NASA’s communications professionals who bring our story to life,” said Will Boyington, associate administrator for the Office of Communications at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Being recognized shows that America’s leadership in space and NASA’s innovative messaging resonate with the public as we share our missions that inspire the world.”
The Webby awards recognize companies across technology, media, entertainment, and social media that have consistently demonstrated creativity and innovation on their digital platforms. NASA’s inclusion in the list underscores the agency’s long-standing commitment to sharing its awe-inspiring missions, discoveries, and educational resources with audiences around the globe.
“Singling out NASA as one of the most iconic and innovative brands shows a government agency can compete on the global digital stage,” said Brittany Brown, head of digital communications at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “We’re proud of our impact as we honor our commitment to connect with the public where they are — online.”
From live-streamed launches to interactive web content and immersive educational experiences, NASA has leveraged digital platforms to engage millions, inspire curiosity, and make space exploration available to all.
The full list of companies included on The Webby 30 is available online.
To learn more about NASA’s missions, visit:
https://www.nasa.gov
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Last Updated Sep 16, 2025 EditorGerelle Q. DodsonLocationNASA Headquarters Related Terms
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By Amazing Space
Live Video from the International Space Station (Seen From The NASA ISS Live Stream)
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By NASA
One of the challenges many teachers face year after year is a sense of working alone. Despite the constant interaction with students many questions often linger: Did the lesson stick? Will students carry this knowledge with them? Will it shape how they see and engage with the world? What can be easy to overlook is that teaching does not happen in isolation. Each classroom, or any other educational setting, is part of a much larger journey that learners travel. This journey extends through a network of educators, where each experience can build on the last. These interconnected networks, known as Connected Learning Ecosystems (CLEs), exist wherever learning happens. At their core, CLEs are the collective of people who contribute to a young person’s growth and education over time.
Educators at the August 2025 Connected Learning Ecosystems Gathering in Orono, ME engaged in discussion around using NASA data in their learning contexts. Recognizing this, NASA’s Science Activation Program launched the Learning Ecosystems Northeast (LENE) project to strengthen and connect regional educator networks across Maine and the broader Northeast. With a shared focus on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM), LENE brings together teachers, librarians, 4-H mentors, land trust educators, and many others committed to expanding scientific understanding, deepening data literacy, and preparing youth to navigate a changing planet. To support this work, LENE hosts biannual Connected Learning Ecosystem Gatherings. These multi-day events bring educators together to share progress, celebrate achievements, and plan future collaborations. More than networking, these gatherings reinforce the collective impact educators have, ensuring that their efforts resonate far beyond individual classrooms and enrich the lives of the learners they guide.
“I am inspired by the GMRI staff and participants. I never expected to get to do climate resilience-related work in my current job as a children’s librarian. I am excited to do meaningful and impactful work with what I gain from being part of this the LENE community. This was a very well-run event! Thank you to all!” -anonymous
This year’s Gathering took place August 12 and 13, 2025, in Orono, ME at the University of Maine (a LENE project partner). Nearly 70 educators from across the northeast came together for two amazingly energized days of connection, learning, and future planning. While each event is special, this summer’s Gathering was even more remarkable due to the fact that for, the first time, each workshop was led by an established LENE educator. Either by self-nomination or request from leadership (requiring little convincing), every learning experience shared over the conference days was guided by the thoughtful investigation and real life application of LENE Project Partners, CLE Lead Educators, and community collaborators.
Brian Fitzgerald and Jackie Bellefontaine from the Mount Washington Observatory in New Hampshire, a LENE Project Partner, led the group through a hands-on activity using NASA data and local examples to observe extreme weather. Librarian Kara Reiman guided everyone through the creation and use of a newly established Severe Weather Disaster Prep Kit, including games and tools to manage climate anxiety. Katrina Heimbach, a long time CLE constituent from Western Maine taught how to interpret local data using a creative and fun weaving technique. Because of the established relationship between Learning Ecosystems Northeast and the University of Maine, attendees to the Gathering were able to experience a guided tour through the Advanced Structures and Composites Center and one of its creations, the BioHome3D – the world’s first 3D printed house made entirely with forest-derived, recyclable materials.
Two full days of teachers leading teachers left the entire group feeling energized and encouraged, connected, and centered. The increased confidence in their practices gained by sustained support from their peers allowed these educators to step up and share – embodying the role of Subject Matter Expert. Seeing their colleagues take center stage makes it easier for other educators to envision themselves in similar roles and provides clear guidance on how to take those steps themselves. One educator shared their thoughts following the experience:
“This was my first time attending the LENE conference, and I was immediately welcomed and made to feel ‘part of it all’. I made connections with many of the educators who were present, as well as the LENE staff and facilitators. I hope to connect with my new CLE mates in the near future!” Another participant reported, “I am inspired by the … staff and participants. I never expected to get to do climate resilience-related work in my current job as a children’s librarian. I am excited to do meaningful and impactful work with what I gain from being part of the LENE community. This was a very well-run event! Thank you to all!”
Even with the backing of regional groups, many educators, especially those in rural communities, still struggle with a sense of isolation. The biannual gatherings play an important role in countering that, highlighting the fact that this work is unfolding across the state. Through Connected Learning Ecosystems, educators are able to build and reinforce networks that help close the gaps created by distance and geography.
These Gatherings are part of ongoing programming organized by Learning Ecosystems Northeast, based at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, that fosters peer communities across the Northeast, through which teachers, librarians, and out-of-school educators can collaborate to expand opportunities for youth to engage in data-driven investigations and integrate in- and out-of-school learning. Learn more about Learning Ecosystems Northeast’s efforts to empower the next generation of environmental stewards: https://www.learningecosystemsnortheast.org.
The Learning Ecosystems Northeast project is supported by NASA under cooperative agreement award number NNX16AB94A and is part of NASA’s Science Activation Portfolio. Learn more about how Science Activation connects NASA science experts, real content, and experiences with community leaders to do science in ways that activate minds and promote deeper understanding of our world and beyond: https://science.nasa.gov/learn/about-science-activation/.
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Last Updated Sep 15, 2025 Related Terms
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