Clarksville, TN — In April, four astronauts flew closer to the Moon than anyone had in more than half a century, and one of the images they sent home shows the rings of a basin no human had ever seen up close. On Tuesday, September 1st, an Austin Peay State University scientist who has held Moon rocks in her own hands will help make sense of what that mission — and others like it — are teaching us.
Austin Peay opens its fall Science on Tap series at 5:30pm that evening at Strawberry Alley Ale Works in downtown Clarksville. The talk is free, open to all ages, and asks nothing of you but curiosity and a seat upstairs.
Dr. Amanda Stadermann, assistant professor of geology in APSU’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, will present “Moon Joy! What We Learn When We Go to the Moon.” Her talk traces the new era of lunar exploration, including NASA’s Artemis program, and what the rocks carried back from the Moon reveal about the history of Earth’s nearest neighbor.
That history is personal for Stadermann. Before joining Austin Peay, she spent two years as a NASA postdoctoral fellow at Johnson Space Center in Houston, where she worked directly with Apollo mission rocks returned to Earth in the 1960s and 1970s, among the most precious geological samples on the planet. She earned her doctorate in planetary sciences from the University of Arizona and is the lead author on four peer-reviewed papers, much of her research tracing the Moon’s earliest volcanism and how planetary bodies form and evolve.
Her curiosity reaches well beyond the Moon. At Austin Peay, Stadermann studies meteorites — rocks that have traveled millions of miles to reach Earth — and recently brought a scanning electron microscope into her department, giving undergraduates a close look at worlds they would otherwise only read about.
The timing could hardly be better. On April 6th, 2026, the Artemis II crew — NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen — completed a seven-hour flyby of the Moon, the first crewed voyage to lunar distance since Apollo 17 in 1972. At their farthest, they traveled 252,756 miles from Earth, the greatest distance humans have ever ventured from home. Among the features they photographed was the ringed Orientale basin shown above, a roughly 600-mile-wide impact crater straddling the Moon’s near and far sides — and, until that morning, a sight no human eye had taken in directly.
About Science on Tap
Science on Tap brings APSU College of STEM faculty together with the community for an evening of approachable science in a relaxed setting. The series runs the first Tuesday of each month during the academic year, upstairs at Strawberry Alley Ale Works, with doors opening at 5:00pm. No ticket, no cover and no background in science required — just show up and look up.
Editor’s Note: Brian Dunn, Austin Peay State University, contributed to this report.
