On September 22, Lauren Edgar took a major step closer to one day setting foot on the moon or even Mars when NASA officially named her one of its 10 new astronaut candidates. These modern-day Magellans—six women and four men chosen from among more than 8,000 applicants—are the first group of astronaut candidates selected since 2021.
Edgar has already moved with her husband and their dog from San Diego to Houston to start the intensive two years of astronaut training, after which she will be eligible for a mission assignment. “It’s certainly exciting to think about lunar exploration and getting to do geology on the surface of the moon,” Edgar said. “But, I say, don’t hold your breath. There’s quite a bit of time and a lot of training in the near term.”
Some of the training will be familiar to her: As deputy principal investigator for NASA’s Artemis III geology team for the past several years, Edgar has helped train astronauts preparing to go to the moon. Then a research geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey’s Astrogeology Science Center in Arizona, Edgar and Dartmouth earth sciences professor Marisa Palucis taught a geology “crash course” for astronaut candidates. It covered how to make measurements on the moon and what can be learned from the shape and size of rocks and other surface features. “I’ve been telling our new class how exciting the geology training is going to be,” Edgar said.
The United States has not sent anyone to the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972. NASA recommitted to moon exploration with its Artemis program in 2017 and launched Artemis I in 2022 with mannequins and robots aboard. The Artemis II moon mission, scheduled to launch sometime between February 5 and April 2026, will circle the moon with a crew of four. Jeff Radigan, NASA’S lead flight director for Artemis II, says the 10-day mission will spend about half a day flying past the moon. “A significant portion of the moon has never been seen,” he said. “Cameras don’t really show the right coloring of the moon. It’s an opportunity to see the actual coloring, the granularity of its surface, an opportunity to see parts of the moon not observed by human eyes.”
Artemis II also will test systems to prepare for Artemis III, which NASA plans to land on the moon in 2027 with a crew of four. Kelsey Young, NASA’s science flight operations lead across Artemis, has worked with Edgar at NASA on astronaut training. “I’m really thrilled, as another geologist and planetary geologist, to work with her in her new role,” Young said. “Science is one of the fundamental pillars of Artemis, a major goal of these missions. We’re really excited to have a new scientist joining the astronaut office who has planetary science experience.” The backgrounds of the 10 new astronaut candidates range from test pilots and aerospace engineers to a biomedical researcher and a neuroscientist.
Though my flight suit is blue, I’m still bleeding green.”
Edgar has more than 17 years of mission operations experience with the Mars Science Laboratory and Mars Exploration Rovers. “It’s exciting to think about applying those lessons that we’ve learned through Mars exploration with robots to how we might do human exploration,” she said. “Working on the rover missions, you spend a whole day on Earth planning what the rover will do that day on Mars. You get the luxury of some time to think through very carefully what those observations and priorities will be for that day. It’s a much faster pace with humans than with robots.”
During the announcement at the NASA Space Center in Houston, several astronaut candidates were asked to tell the audience something surprising about themselves. Edgar mentioned that she loves to do handstands everywhere she goes—from mountaintops and glaciers to the bottom of the Grand Canyon—“but not yet on this stage,” she added, drawing a big laugh.
Edgar earned a master’s and doctorate in geology from Cal Tech. At Dartmouth, she started as an engineering major but pivoted to earth sciences. Her first year she interned with the Women in Science Project, studying meteorites and micrometeorites collected from Earth’s South Pole. She said earth sciences professor Mukul Sharma and former astronaut Jay Buckey, M.D., a professor of medicine and director of the Dartmouth Space Medicine Innovations Lab, were important influences. Eighteen years after graduating, she points out, “Though my flight suit is blue, I’m still bleeding green.”
As an undergrad, she later did an internship at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, studying big impact basins on Mars, which became the subject of her senior honors thesis. “It made us rethink some of the ages of the crust through different regions of Mars,” she explained. “We’re really looking forward to figuring out if there are resources such as water ice that might be able to support sustained exploration in these regions.”
