Tapped last October as one of NASA’s 10 new astronaut candidates, Edgar will be eligible for a space mission after two years of intensive training. It would not be the first time she has experienced weightlessness. Jay Buckey Jr., a Geisel professor of medicine and former payload specialist astronaut, was Edgar’s faculty mentor when she and Abigail Davidson ’05, Th’07, flew on a NASA parabolic flight for an experiment on maintaining muscle health during weightlessness. They flew briefly in space and later made a presentation about their experiment at the Aerospace Medical Association meeting, Buckey recalls.
Edgar, a geologist, has more than 17 years of mission operations experience supporting the Mars Science Lab and Mars Exploration Rovers. “It’s really exciting to think about applying those lessons we’ve learned through Mars exploration with robots to how we might do human exploration,” she says. Edgar took a class Buckey helped teach called “Life on Mars?” The first line in a paper she wrote: “It’s inevitable that humans one day will walk on the surface of Mars.” Buckey adds, “It’ll be her!”
