Tabitha Aldridge

Tabitha Aldridge is a Master’s student with a keen interest in planetary geology and being outdoors. After a post-undergraduate NASA summer internship at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, she came to NIU with intentions to continue her work with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter’s Mini-RF mission science team. Since arriving at NIU, she has worked to determine correlations between radar backscatter, multi-spectral data from the Mini-SAR instrument aboard the Clementine mission, and lunar geology.

Tabitha has served as a teaching assistant since her enrollment at NIU and has been awarded a grant from the Goldich Fund. With this funding, she traveled to the 42nd Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas to present her initial research findings. She will present more recent results at future meetings of the American Geophysical Union in San Fransisco, California, the Geological Society of America in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and once again at the 43rd Lunar and Planetary Science Conference.

View Tabitha's Slideshow

Thesis Research

A Mini-RF radar analysis of the Moon’s South Pole-Aitken basin. Determine correlations between Mini-RF radar backscatter, multi-spectral data from the Mini-SAR instrument aboard the Clementine mission, and lunar geology.

Abstracts and Publications

• Aldridge T.M., Thomson B.J., Stoddard P.R., Cahill J.T.S., Bussey D.B.J., and the Mini-RF Science Team, 2011, A Mini-RF Radar Analysis of the Moon’s South Pole-Aitken Basin: 42nd Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, The Woodlands, Texas, March 7-11.
• Safko T., Kelly D., Guzewich S., Bell S., Rivkin A.S., Kirby K.W., Gold R.E., Cheng A.F., Aldridge T.M., Colon C.M., Colson A.D., Lantukh D.V., Pashai P., Quinn D., Yun E.H., ASTERIA Team, 2011, ASTERIA: A Robotic Precursor Mission to Near-Earth Asteroid 2002 TD60: 42nd Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, The Woodlands, Texas, March 7-11.
• McAdam M.M., Cahill J.T.S., Patterson W., Aldridge T., Bussey D.B.J., Turtle E.P., Thomson B.J., Neish C.D., and the Mini-RF Science Team, 2011, Mini-RF Global Radar Observations of the Moon: 42nd Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, The Woodlands, Texas, March 7-11.