Professor of Geosciences Barbara Tewksbury was quoted in an article about how NASA astronaut candidates train for space exploration. The story, titled “Before They Go to Space, Astronauts Go to Geology Camp,” appeared on Space.com on March 7.
Astronaut candidates must learn about geology in order to help them understand what things look like from hundreds of miles above a planet’s surface. One way to do this is through fieldwork where they can experience rocks in their natural environment and see how geology works.
By learning about what geologists do in the field and why, the candidates get a sense of what they may one day do as they explore far beyond Earth.
Tewksbury has been working with the training program for the past decade. “We have the greatest experiment, and it’s all cooked and done and it’s the Earth, and we're trying to figure out what the conditions of the experiment were,” she said.
The article also included a photo of Tewksbury working with astronaut candidates last summer during field training in New Mexico.
