Adyson Hammock
news@greenepublishing.com
In honor of Black History Month, on Wednesday, Feb. 15, NASA announced they would be naming a large, 60-mile wide mountain, formerly called Leibnitz Beta, near the South pole of Earth's moon, Mons Mouton, after Melba Roy Mouton, one of the “hidden figures” of NASA's mathematicians in the late 1950's and early 60's. The “Hidden Figures” are the many women that were working behind the scenes in Project Mercury, which was America's first crewed space program, who did not receive credit for their work on the launch. In the last decade, NASA has been attempting to shed light on these women that were hired as essential workers in the program leading up to the launch.
Melba Roy Mouton began working at NASA in 1959, where she was the head mathematician of the many women that NASA hired as 'human calculators'. These women's jobs were to do math equations by hand and track communications satellites to keep the launch running smoothly. However, due to discrimination against Black individuals and segregation still being relevant at the time, many of these employees were discredited for their work. In 1961, Mouton was promoted to head programmer, where she focused on locating and keeping track of spacecrafts. Her natural leadership, skill, and intelligence helped to pave the way for many women of color working at NASA in the future.