astronomy

Lindy Elkins-Tanton

Lindy Elkins-Tanton is a astronomy topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Lindy Elkins-Tanton rather than just read about it. In short: Linda Tarbox Elkins-Tanton is an American planetary scientist and professor whose research concerns terrestrial planetary evolution. She is the Principal Investigator of NASA's Psyche mission to explore the metallic asteroid 16 Psyche, Director of the UC Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory, and co-founder of Beagle Learning, a tech company training and measuring collaborative problem-solving and critical thinking.

Key takeaways

Lindy Elkins-Tanton belongs to astronomy; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Lindy Elkins-Tanton to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Lindy Elkins-Tanton from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Linda Tarbox Elkins-Tanton is an American planetary scientist and professor whose research concerns terrestrial planetary evolution. She is the Principal Investigator of NASA's Psyche mission to explore the metallic asteroid 16 Psyche, Director of the UC Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory, and co-founder of Beagle Learning, a tech company training and measuring collaborative problem-solving and critical thinking. Much of her current work concerns supporting teams to excel both for their products and projects and for the individual team members; these ideas are laid out in her book on teams, Mission Ready: How to Build Teams that Perform under Pressure (Basic Venture, an imprint of Hachette, 2026).

Career Elkins-Tanton earned her B.S. in geology, M.S. in geochemistry, and Ph.D. in geology, all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was a professor at MIT, a research scientist at Brown University, and a lecturer at St. Mary's College of Maryland, and worked in the industry for a number of years. Within 10 years of completing her Ph.D. and serving as an associate professor in geology at MIT, she was recruited to the directorship position at the Carnegie Institution for Science's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism. She became the director of Arizona State University's School of Earth and Space Science on July 1, 2014 and went on to be Vice President for ASU's Interplanetary Initiative before departing for UC Berkeley in 2025. At UC Berkeley she serves as Director of the Space Sciences Laboratory, which was founded in 1959 and has led or participated in over 100 space missions to learn about our solar system, galaxy, and universe. Elkins-Tanton leads NASA's Psyche mission to explore the metallic asteroid 16 Psyche. The mission launched successfully on October 13, 2023, and is operating as expected on its cruise to the asteroid. Elkins-Tanton is the second woman to win a competed NASA mission to a major Solar System body. Elkins-Tanton is also a co-founder of and the Higher Education Lead for Beagle Learning, which provides software tools and coaching that make passion projects, project teams, and exploration-based learning techniques accessible. Elkins-Tanton has led four field expeditions in Siberia for a broad study that demonstrated the chronology of extinction and eruption, quantified additions of sulphur and naturally-occurring halocarbons to the atmosphere, and provided the first ever direct evidence that extensive coal burning in Siberia is a cause of the Permo-Triassic Extinction. She is co-chair of the landmark NAS report A Science Strategy for the Human Exploration of Mars (2025), and has served on the Planetary Decadal Survey Mars panel, the Mars 2020 Rover Science Definition Team, and the Europa Clipper Standing Review Board.

Awards and honors Elkins-Tanton was twice named a National Academy of Sciences Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow. She was awarded a five-year National Science Foundation CAREER award in 2008 and was named Outstanding MIT Faculty Undergraduate Research Mentor in 2009. In 2010, she was awarded the Explorers Club Lowell Thomas prize for Exploring Extinction. In 2013, she was named an Astor Fellow at the University of Oxford hosted by Tamsin Mather. In 2016 she was named a fellow of the American Geophysical Union. In 2020 she was awarded the Arthur L. Day Prize and Lectureship. Asteroid 8252 Elkins-Tanton is named after her. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and in 2022 William Morrow published her memoir, A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman. In 2025 she was awarded the NASA Outstanding Public Leadership Medal. In 2022, a newly discovered mineral, elkinstantonite, found in the El Ali meteorite, was named after Elkins-Tanton by Drs. Chris Herd and Andrew Locock of the University of Alberta.

Selected publications Elkins-Tanton, Lindy (2026) Mission Ready: How to Build Teams that Perform under Pressure, Basic Venture, an imprint of Hachette Publishing. p.296. ISBN 978-1-5417-0603-3 Polanskey, C.A., L.T. Elkins-Tanton…et al. (2025) Psyche mission description and design rationale, Space Science Reviews, 221(95), p. 94. Elkins-Tanton, Linda (2022). A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman: A Memoir. HarperCollins. p. 272. ISBN 978-0063086906. Elkins-Tanton, L.T., S.E. Grasby, B.A. Black, R.V. Veselovskiy, O.H. Ardakani, F. Goodarzi (2020) Field evidence for coal combustion links the 252 My-old Siberian Traps with global carbon disruption, Geology v48(1), v 48(10), 986–991. L.T. Elkins-Tanton and B. Weiss, editors. (2017) Planetesimals: Early Differentiation and Consequences for Planets, Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-107-11848-5 Elkins-Tanton, Linda; Schmidt, Anja; Fristad, Kirsten (2015). Volcanism and Global Environmental Change. Cambridge University Press. p. 310. ISBN 978-1107058378. Schmidt, Anja; Fristad, Kirsten; Elkins-Tanton, Linda; editors (2015). Volcanism and Global Environmental Change. Cambridge University Press. p. 310. ISBN 978-1-107-05837-8 Elkins-Tanton, L.T., (2012) Magma oceans in the inner solar system, Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences, 40, 113-139. Elkins-Tanton, L.T., B.P. Weiss, M.T. Zuber (2011) Chondrites as samples of differentiated planetesimals, Earth and Planetary Science Letters 305, 1-10, DOI: 10.1016/j.epsl.2011.03.010. Elkins-Tanton, Linda (2010). The Solar System Six-Volume Set. Facts on File. ISBN 978-0-8160-8347-3. Elkins-Tanton L.T. (2008) Linked magma ocean solidification and atmospheric growth for Earth and Mars, Earth and Planetary Science Letters 271, 181-191.

See also List of women in leadership positions on astronomical instrumentation projects

References

External links Arizona State University Psyche mission Her talk on the Psyche mission in the Silicon Valley Astronomy Lecture Series NASA JPL Psyche mission page

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Lindy Elkins-Tanton

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Lindy Elkins-Tanton claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In astronomy, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Lindy Elkins-Tanton before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Lindy Elkins-Tanton ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Lindy Elkins-Tanton

In research: Lindy Elkins-Tanton appears in astronomy research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Lindy Elkins-Tanton in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Lindy Elkins-Tanton is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 20th-century American astronomers, 20th-century American women scientists, 21st-century American astronomers, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Lindy Elkins-Tanton outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Lindy Elkins-Tanton in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Lindy Elkins-Tanton means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
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Frequently asked questions

What is Lindy Elkins-Tanton in simple terms?

Why does Lindy Elkins-Tanton matter?

Because it connects several astronomy ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Lindy Elkins-Tanton?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Lindy Elkins-Tanton.