NASA announced its 2025 class of astronaut candidates, and this one in particular caught my eye:
Lauren Edgar, 40, considers Sammamish, Washington, her hometown. She earned a bachelor’s degree in Earth sciences from Dartmouth College, and her master’s and doctorate in geology from the California Institute of Technology. Edgar has served as the deputy principal investigator for the Artemis III Geology Team. In this role, she helped define lunar science goals, geology activities NASA astronauts will conduct, and science operations for NASA’s return to the Moon. She also spent more than 17 years supporting Mars exploration rovers. She was working at the U.S. Geological Survey at the time of her selection.
Following in the footsteps of Jack Schmitt, currently still the only scientist to have walked on the moon. Perhaps Dr Edgar's bootprints will also mark the lunar dust some day!
BTW, she got her bachelor's exactly 50 years after Schmitt, who earned his at CalTech in '57 (and his doctorate at Harvard). Lauren also, like Jack, has been training astronauts in geology:
Why do astronauts need to know a little bit about geology?
The training has three main objectives. The first is that we recognize when they’re on board the International Space Station, when they’re in orbit, they have a unique vantage point to look back on the Earth. When they know the right kind of processes or landforms to look for, it’s really helpful to get their scientific expertise from that vantage point. So it’s training them to make observations of the Earth. It’s training them if they have boots on the ground somewhere, on the Moon or Mars, how to do field geology, how to construct a geologic map, how to do the right kind of sampling. Then we’re also training them to be advocates for geology when they move on to other projects.
I hadn’t thought about that before, that even if they’re just at the International Space Station and not actually walking on another planet, they can still learn a lot about Earth’s geology by looking down.
Absolutely. Just a few weeks ago there was another volcanic eruption off the coast of Russia, and one of the astronauts onboard that had gone through geology training was able to be the first person to capture this volcanic eruption going on and sent the picture back to Earth and especially on to some of the geology trainers. So it emphasizes they’re really taking to heart what we’re teaching them.
USGS has already updated her staff bio page, which now says Lauren Edgar, Ph.D. (Former Employee). The last paper she worked on was published this summer, called On the importance of geological and geophysical lunar field work enabled by Artemis Base Camp:
The Moon is a geological, rocky world. As such, an obvious question to ask at any given lunar locale is, “What are the geological and geophysical conditions here, and how do they tie into the global picture of the Moon, its formation, and evolution?” Furthermore, geological context–in addition to being a scientific end in its own right–is a crucial foundation for any other area of investigation, ranging from building astronomical observatories to studying the Moonspace environmental interface to enabling in-situ resource utilization (ISRU).
While short-duration, Apollo-style sortie missions to various lunar locales have the advantage of accessing the widest diversity of geologic terrains, sorties are tightly constrained on the amount of scientific and logistical support equipment available. The concept of one or multiple Artemis Base Camp(s) (ABC or ABCs) raises intriguing possibilities for enhanced field geology or geophysical field science on the Moon by astronaut crews.
Anyway, congratulations to the good doctor and her colleagues.
Ex Luna, Scientia!
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