The youngest Nobel Peace Prize winner and girls' education campaigner Malala Yousafzai now has an asteroid named after her, the Malala Fund announced through its blog on Wednesday.
Malala Fund
#Awesome --> NASA Astronomer Dr. Amy Mainzer explains why she named this asteroid for Malala http://bit.ly/1Oeuarq
Dr. Amy Mainzer, astronomer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, USA, named Asteroid 316201 after Malala.
He said, "It is a great honour to be able to name an asteroid after Malala. My postdoctoral fellow Dr. Carrie Nugent brought to my attention the fact that although many asteroids have been named, very few have been named to honor the contributions of women (and particularly women of color)."
Dr. Mainzer discovered the asteroid, which gives her the right to name it, in the Main Belt between Mars and Jupiter. It orbits the Sun every 5.5 years; you can see its approximate location in the image below.
The formal designation of the asteroid is 316201 Malala, or 2010 ML48. The asteroid is the red dot in the upper right of the image. This is an infrared image of the asteroid (as narrated by Malala Fund blog), which means we are sensing the heat it emits rather than the sunlight it reflects off its surface.
Malala, now 17 and the youngest recipient of the Nobel prize, is an education campaigner in Pakistan who was shot in the head by a Taliban gunman two years ago.
She has already received a host of awards, standing ovations and plaudits from the United Nations to Buckingham Palace.
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