Carle McGetchin Pieters is a noted American planetary scientist. Dr Pieters has published more that 150 research articles in peer-reviewed journals, including the book Remote Geochemical Analyses. Her general research efforts include planetary exploration and evolution of planetary surfaces with an emphasis on remote compositional analyses.[1]
Pieters earned her B.A. from Antioch College in 1966 in math-education. After teaching high school math for one year in Massachusetts, she spent two years teaching science as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Malaysia. Upon her return to the US, she received her B.S. (1971), M.S. (1972) and Ph.D. (1977) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Planetary Science. Dr. Pieters spent 3 years at NASA Johnson Space Center before becoming a professor at Brown University in 1980 and has remained there ever since. She is the Principal Investigator for the Moon Mineralogy Mapper, an imaging spectrometer (0.4-3.0 µm) designed to characterize and map the mineralogy of the Moon at high resolution, an instrument that was sent to the Moon on the Indian Chandraayan-1 spacecraft. She is also a co-investigator on NASA's Dawn mission to the asteroids Vesta and Ceres.