Mareta Nelle West The moon at our feet How many times has the phrase ‘ I will give you the moon’ been used ? Mareta West did not exactly gift us the terrestrial satellite, but she studied it and selected the location in which the first astronaut placed his feet in 1969. Undoubtedly, her work was a small step for women geologists, but a great leap for humanity. Her story began 57 years earlier, in the state of Oklahoma (USA), where she was born in 1915 into a family of American pioneers. Several decades earlier, her grandparents had migrated west to settle in Indian territory, as part of the state’s repopulation of lands after the displacement of Native Americans. Mareta was raised in the cities of Tulsa and Oklahoma City and, at the age of 22, she received her BA in geology from the University of Oklahoma, where she was a member of the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority. She was a pioneer, not only because of her family history, but also because of her personal commitment. Early in her career, in the 1940s, Mareta worked for more than a decade as an oil geologist in the flourishing oil and gas industry. She was Oklahoma’s first female consulting geologist before becoming the first geologist hired by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) in Arizona in 1964. Two years earlier, in the middle of the Cold War with the former Soviet Union, President John F. Kennedy had delivered the speech that would kick off the American race to the Moon, whose surface and geology were still great unknowns. The challenge posed by the USA to the USSR, which until then had demonstrated its space supremacy, would make Mareta West the first woman astrogeologist. She was the only woman on NASA’s experimental geology team that prepared the first manned lunar landing: the Apollo 11 mission. She participated in the development of maps that were used for astronaut training and was responsible for mapping and marking the most suitable landing point (south of the Sea of Tranquillity) for the fragile Eagle lander, in which Armstrong and Aldrin were to travel in July 1969. Mareta wholeheartedly defended space research as a way to ‘ decipher much of what remains unknown about our own planet’ . After the return of Apollo 11, she devoted herself to studying the information, rock samples and photographs that the astronauts collected; she remained involved, until her retirement, in the evaluation and selection of landing sites for subsequent missions to the Moon and Mars. She died in 1998, almost 30 years after that great scientific and technological challenge. After her death, her ashes travelled to space, that place she dreamed of so much. Studying geology gives an excellent perspective and helps to understand that a life is just an instant in the history of our planet. 27
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