Artemis 2 moon astronaut helped discover a rare crater on Earth

A dozen years ago, a future moon astronaut boldly went on his first geology expedition with a Canadian university.

Using a float plane, a canoe and their wits, Artemis 2 astronaut Jeremy Hansen and a team from Western University in Ontario explored a distant area in Saskatchewan they’d only been seen before in satellite images. Recent peer-reviewed research now confirms their crater is among the many rarest seen on Earth. 

Saskatchewan’s Gow Lake crater even has analogies with some moon divots, most closely with one named after Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno. Hansen might even see this lunar far-side crater together with his own eyes when he cruises across the moon in late 2024 on the Artemis 2 mission.

“That is the ability of why you will have to get into the sector,” study lead writer Gordon Osinski, a planetary scientist at Western University who’s often cited as Canada’s top crater expert, told Space.com. “You’ve got to do ground truth. You’ll be able to’t all the time depend on what you see in satellite images.”

NASA and other space agencies prize distant expedition skills when hiring astronauts. (Artemis 2 crew member Christina Koch, for instance, worked as a research scientist in Antarctica.) All astronauts in training also tackle wilderness trips, undersea expeditions or cave exploring to spice up their skills for space.

Hansen was a young astronaut candidate in July 2011, when the Saskatchewan expedition took place. As he was not certified for spaceflight yet, he made no public comments on the time, the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) confirmed to Space.com. (Hansen was also unavailable for a fresh interview as a consequence of several days of policy discussions and events on Capitol Hill for Artemis 2.)

The fighter pilot, nonetheless, has spoken quite a few times about how geology expeditions with Osinski and others helped prepare him mentally and scientifically for spaceflight — and to work in small teams. Artemis 2 might be Hansen’s first spaceflight (as Canada’s small spaceflight contributions allow for a seat on crewed missions only once every six years). 

That said, Hansen is well-regarded for his space policy and management experience and has racked up loads of distant time within the cockpit, underwater, in caves and particularly within the wilderness.

“The explanation I am going on these geology expeditions is because, as an astronaut, we’re preparing to do exploration on other planetary bodies and, after all, geology goes to be an enormous a part of the science we do there,” Hansen told MyKawartha.com, a media outlet based not removed from London, Ontario, where Western University relies, in 2015.

Related: Artemis 2’s Canadian astronaut got his moon mission seat with ‘potato salad’

The brand new Saskatchewan crater paper, published within the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science on May 15, had a delayed submission date after the 2011 tour as a consequence of more pressing research concerns and the pandemic, Osinski said. However the waiting time was value it as lab instrumentation improved within the intervening 12 years, making the follow-up research easier to perform.

It’s the primary detailed study of Gow Lake, a crater that formed roughly 200 million years ago. The crater was initially examined briefly within the Nineteen Seventies during a regional survey; geologists on site picked up some “weird rocks” not reflective of the local terrain and confirmed within the lab they were shaped by a stone-melting impact, Osinski said.

The Western geologist, who has investigated quite a few craters around Canada for many years, set off on the journey alongside Hansen and two students “into the unknown,” he said. “We jumped on a float plane and we did it by canoe as well, which was also a fun solution to do a geology expedition. We landed on the islands, arrange camp after which went out exploring.”

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Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, left, joins other Gow Lake expedition members in 2011. Attending to the distant lake in Saskatchewan, Canada required using a float plane.

Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, left, worked in a canoe alongside other crew members through the 2011 expedition to Gow Lake. Hansen was on his first-ever geology expedition and received training on what craters appear like up close.

Western University, which led the expedition under planetary sciences professor Gordon Osinski, follows strict safety protocols during distant geology expeditions concerning medical training and mitigating wildlife like bears.

The 2011 expedition to Gow Lake was a small group of 4 people. NASA likes all astronauts to undergo distant expeditions like this one to arrange for spaceflight.

Craters on Earth erode over time as a consequence of the consequences of wind and water, and features will be obscured by flora like shown here. Against this, the moon’s erosion is as a consequence of occasional meteorites and the pressure of the solar wind, which is rather more gradual.

Osinski described Gow Lake as a lake with an island in the middle. Coincidentally, the team landed in the world in 2011, just a few years after a significant wildfire within the region burned the terrain, leaving a scarred landscape behind. However the undergrowth still was heavy, resulting in a “bushwhacking geology expedition” in quest of interesting rocks, he said.

“We were teaching Jeremy some tricks, resembling lots of (rock) outcrops being along the lakeshore. We did that by canoe, after which inland,” Osinski added. “A few of one of the best outcrops were where big trees fell over, and the roots actually exposed the rocks underneath. We put together the geology map of the island and located lots of really interesting rock types that I wasn’t expecting, given how old this site was.”

An example was impact melt rocks resembling columnar joints, which form hexagonal cracks as basalt lava cools; those are present in locations just like the famous Giant’s Causeway in Ireland. Gow Lake had “several-meter thick rocks” with such joints, Osinski said, which he termed as “quite rare” around the globe.

Pivoting briefly to the moon, similar impact events allow for dating because the extreme heat resets the radiometric clock by which rocks are dated through natural decay. Gow Lake could provide a superb analogy for craters near the moon’s south pole, where NASA goals to land the Artemis 3 mission in 2025 and construct a number of bases in the next years.

But the largest find was the crater type. The satellite images had fooled geologists for 50 years. At first the wisdom was that Gow Lake was formed as a posh crater, a form also seen on the moon. This sort of crater results from larger impacts, when the central peak in the center collapses. 

“But it surely seems that the island is definitely made from these melt rocks and impact breccias, not actually material uplifted from depth,” Osinski said. 

What they as a substitute saw was a transitional crater, which has only been present in one other spot on Earth: Goat Paddock in northwestern Australia. There may once have been more of those craters on Earth which have since been masked or erased by erosion, Osinski said.

Transitional craters, nonetheless, are common on the moon and will provide helpful details about how space rocks affect the local environment following a meteorite crash, Osinski said. 

“Those sorts of rocks which might be produced by meteorite impact, they might be completely littering the Artemis zone,” he said, adding that it’ll be interesting to view them up close versus other rocks produced by ancient volcanoes. 

Hansen’s tour with Osinski was the first-ever by a CSA astronaut. Since then, he has racked up three more trips with the Western geologist. Two other CSA astronauts (David Saint-Jacques and Joshua Kutryk) have done one geology trip each with the Western team. 

Osinski’s work is now so well-regarded that he has given geology training to 2 recent NASA astronaut classes.

There have been lessons learned from Saskatchewan that Osinski implemented for future CSA excursions, he noted, resembling inviting astronauts to the lab afterward to “close the loop” and have a look at a number of the collected samples. Hansen, he added, was a “very quick learner” and picked up data alongside the remainder of the team. 

While the astronaut will not be listed as a study writer, Hansen is cited warmly within the acknowledgements “for his companionship in the sector.” The CSA can be thanked “for support for astronaut training activities.”

Osinski will proceed to bring his geology experience to lunar realms. He’s the lead scientist on a Canadian lunar rover being developed by the corporate Canadensys Aerospace, which is anticipated to the touch down on the surface in 2026. The rover is in Phase B to solidify the design, including initial concepts for the science instruments. Landing site selection is ongoing.

Osinski has also applied to be on the “back room” geology teams for Artemis 3, in response to a recent NASA solicitation that closed Feb. 26. Selectees will work closely with NASA Mission Control during lunar excursions, following a model pioneered during Apollo. 

But whether he gets to the back room or not, Osinski said he’s glad to work alongside Artemis astronauts as they prepare for lunar excursions. 

“These ‘training expeditions’ are literally not training expeditions, but they are surely expeditionary research expeditions,” Osinski said of the geology work his teams perform with astronauts. “Real science comes out of it. I feel that just makes it rather more realistic — and helpful — an experience.”