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Abigail Fraeman
Deputy Project Scientist for NASA's Curiosity Rover
Abigail is a research scientist in the Planetary Science section at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She is the deputy project scientist for NASA's Curiosity rover and one of The Planetary Society’s student astronauts.
She is broadly interested in the origin and evolution of terrestrial bodies in our solar system, and her work has concentrated on investigating how the complex geologic histories of Mars and its moons are preserved in their rock records. She specializes in remote sensing with a focus on visible to near-infrared reflectance spectroscopy. She received a Ph.D. in Earth & Planetary Science from Washington University in St. Louis and a B.S. in Physics and in Geology & Geophysics from Yale University.
Latest Articles
Abigail Fraeman examines how the Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, changed our view of Mars.
One of the hot topics of the 8th International Conference on Mars was the nature of Mars' ancient past. Abigail Fraeman reports on our updated view of whether Mars was ever warm and wet.
We're two weeks in to ‘Dancing with the Stars’ season 17, and Bill Nye has shown that, true to his TV-theme song lyric,
Latest Planetary Radio Appearances
Twenty years after a pioneering collaboration between The Planetary Society, NASA, and LEGO, Planetary Radio reflects on the Red Rover Goes to Mars program and the lives it impacted.
The Mars Exploration Rover mission was declared complete on February 13, 2019. On the very next day, MER Project Manager John Callas and Deputy Project Scientist Abigail Fraeman came to Planetary Society headquarters for an extended and emotional conversation with Mat Kaplan and Emily Lakdawalla.
Join us for an utterly fascinating live conversation with Emily Lakdawalla about her brand new book, The Design and Engineering of Curiosity: How the Mars Rover Performs Its Job. Also joining us at Caltech were Curiosity Project Scientist Ashwin Vasavada and JPL Research Scientist Abigail Fraeman.