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Geoscientist prepares for his first space mission

NASA’s looking for the best and brightest — geoscientists, that is. Andrew Feustel, a graduate of Purdue’s Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and a NASA astronaut, shared this and other insights with a group of students and staff on Friday, October 26. Feustel, a geoscientist whose background includes working with prominent energy companies, will depart on his first space mission next year. He has been tapped to be part of the team deployed to perform repairs on the Hubble telescope.

However, after next year’s Hubble mission, which may be NASA’s last mission to the telescope, the agency is hoping to begin missions to return to the moon and Mars. The research required for both of these missions is highly geoscientific and NASA is hoping to increase the number of geoscientist astronauts in its corps.

“Did you know that each of the astronauts who went to the moon was trained with the equivalent of a master’s degree in geoscience?” he asked the audience. Feustel has a doctoral degree in geoscience from Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada. “It’s actually easier to teach a geoscientist to fly a spaceship than it is to teach a pilot to be a geoscientist,” he said. This is because the crew, regardless of their backgrounds, all learn to fly the ship in the same training sequence, but pilots require additional geoscience training.

In addition to preparing for the Hubble mission, Feustel participated in an expedition to an area of Antarctica known to be similar in terrain to the surface of the moon. There, he was able to conduct some field tests using equipment that might be brought to the moon someday. Often, substantial fieldwork requires a fair bit of often-heavy equipment, including cables, Feustel said. But for a space mission, that’s not feasible. The Antarctic research allows Feustel to explore the efficacy of smaller equipment.

For aspiring astronauts, Feustel advised that they pursue whatever they enjoyed. “When you like what you do, you’ll be good at it,” he said. He never made education or career choices by thinking, ‘this will make me a more attractive astronaut candidate,’ but instead followed his passion and excelled at it. Being good at what you do is one of the most attractive qualifications, he said.

Feustel is only the second geoscience-trained astronaut to join NASA and is the only Purdue astronaut with a non-engineering degree.

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